Set up email on a Porkbun domain

Is Porkbun your DNS host?

If you bought the domain at Porkbun and have not changed its nameservers, yes. On the domain's page under Domain Management, the nameservers read curitiba.ns.porkbun.com, fortaleza.ns.porkbun.com and so on. If they name another company — ns.cloudflare.com, vercel-dns.com — the records go there instead, and that host's guide is the one to follow.

Where the records go

1. Sign in at porkbun.com. You arrive at Domain Management; if you were already signed in, it is under ACCOUNT in the top-right corner.
2. Find the domain and press the DNS button under its name. (The longer way round is Details to the right of the domain, then the edit icon under DNS RECORDS.)
3. The Manage DNS Records page opens, listing every record on the domain. Add Record opens the form for a new one.

What Porkbun calls each field

The third field changes its name with the type you picked — Porkbun's own guide calls it "Answer/Value/IPv4 Address". It is one field, and for everything here it holds the value imado gives you.

Type · Type on imado

Choose it from the list, which spells the type out — TXT, CNAME, MX.

Host · Host on imado

Only the part before your domain — Porkbun adds .example.com itself. For the MX record, leave it empty: Porkbun's blank field is what every other panel writes as @.

Answer · Value on imado

Exactly as shown, copied with the button. Porkbun renames this field with the type, so it may read Answer, Value or Destination.

Priority · Priority on imado

Appears once Type is MX. 10.

TTL

Leave it at 600, which is also the lowest Porkbun allows.

Notes

Yours to use or ignore — a reminder of what the record is for, visible only to you. It changes nothing about the record.

What to put for the domain itself

One record — the MX record, the one that makes mail arrive — belongs to the domain itself rather than to anything in front of it. Every DNS panel has its own way of saying that, and Porkbun's is the one that catches people who have set up a domain somewhere else before:

On Porkbun, leave Host empty. Not @, not example.com. Porkbun's own guide is explicit: for a record on your root domain, you leave the field blank.

@ is the convention most other panels use, and instructions written for one of them will tell you to type it. On Porkbun it means the same thing as an empty field — but the field Porkbun asks you to use is the empty one, so use that. Typing your domain in full is the answer that actually breaks: Porkbun appends the domain to whatever you put there, so example.com becomes example.com.example.com, which saves without complaint and receives nothing.

The other five records all have something in front of the domain — _imado-challenge, _dmarc, the three _domainkey names — and those go in Host exactly as shown, with no domain after them. A CNAME's Host can never be empty, so if Porkbun refuses one of the three signing records for an empty host, the value was pasted into the wrong field.

Add the six records

First the ownership record; then, once imado shows it as Added, the other five. Each one is Add Record, the fields, and Add.

What gets in the way

• Porkbun's email forwarding or email hosting. If either was ever turned on, Porkbun added MX records of its own. Two sets of MX records on one domain send some mail each way; delete Porkbun's before adding imado's. The forwarding stops, and the same addresses can be created on imado.
• The Fix DNS button. Porkbun's Email Hosting and Forwarding page has a Fix DNS button at the bottom that puts Porkbun's own MX and SPF records back on the domain. It is the right button when Porkbun is your mail provider and exactly the wrong one afterwards: pressing it undoes the MX record you added here. If mail stops arriving at imado, check whether it was pressed.
• The host typed in full. Porkbun appends your domain to whatever is in Host. _dmarc.example.com in that field becomes _dmarc.example.com.example.com, saves without complaint, and is never found. Type _dmarc.

Then, on imado

Back on your domain's page, press Check again. Porkbun's changes are usually seen within a few minutes; its lowest TTL is ten minutes, so a record you correct rather than add can take that long to be seen again. When the ownership record is Added, the other records appear; when those are, create the mailbox and send yourself a message — steps 5 and 6 of the setup.

Porkbun's own guides cover adding a record and editing one.