Is Vercel your DNS host?
Only if the domain's nameservers are Vercel's: ns1.vercel-dns.com and ns2.vercel-dns.com. A domain bought through Vercel starts that way. A domain bought elsewhere and added to a Vercel project usually does not — adding it to a project points the website at Vercel and leaves the DNS where it was.
This is the question to settle before anything else, because Vercel will show you a DNS records list for a domain either way. Records added there while the nameservers point somewhere else are saved, listed, and published to nobody. If the domain's page on Vercel does not show Vercel's nameservers as the ones in use, the records go to whoever the nameservers name, and that host's guide is the one to follow.
Where the records go
- Sign in at vercel.com and choose the team the domain belongs to.
- Open Domains in the team's sidebar — the team's, not a project's Settings → Domains, which only attaches a domain to a site — and choose the domain.
- The domain's page lists its DNS records. Fill in the form for a new one and press Add.
What Vercel calls each field
| On imado | On Vercel | What to put |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Type | Choose it from the list; it starts on A, and the fields that follow change with it. |
| Host | Name | Only the part before your domain — Vercel adds .example.com itself. For the MX record, leave it blank: Vercel's blank Name is what most other panels write as @. |
| Value | Value | Exactly as shown, copied with the button, without quotes — and without the priority in front on the MX record, which has a field of its own. |
| Priority | Priority | Appears once Type is MX. 10. |
| — | TTL | Leave it at Vercel's default. |
| — | Comment | Yours to use or ignore — a note on what the record is for. 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 instructions written for a different one are the usual reason a correct-looking MX record receives nothing.
On Vercel, leave Name blank. Vercel's own instructions say so for a record on the root domain, and its API describes the same thing as an empty name. Vercel's command line accepts @ and turns it into an empty name before saving; the dashboard's own instruction is the blank field, so use that.
Do not type the domain in full. Vercel appends your domain to whatever is in Name, and its own troubleshooting page names this as a mistake it does not correct: example.com there becomes example.com.example.com, a name nothing queries.
The other five records all have something in front of the domain — _imado-challenge, _dmarc, the three _domainkey names — and those go in Name exactly as shown, with no domain after them.
Add the six records
First the ownership record; then, once imado shows it as Added, the other five. Each is one press of Add. The form starts on type A, so choose the type before anything else; a value typed under the wrong type is refused.
| Type | Name | Value | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| TXT | _imado-challenge | imado-verification=… | — |
| CNAME | …._domainkey | ….dkim.amazonses.com | — |
| CNAME | …._domainkey | ….dkim.amazonses.com | — |
| CNAME | …._domainkey | ….dkim.amazonses.com | — |
| MX | (empty) | inbound-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com | 10 |
| TXT | _dmarc | v=DMARC1; p=none; | — |
What gets in the way
- Nameservers that are not Vercel's. The records list is there for every domain on Vercel, delegated or not. If
ns1.vercel-dns.comandns2.vercel-dns.comare not the domain's nameservers, nothing you add here is published. Change the nameservers at the registrar, or add the records wherever they point instead. - Moving the nameservers to Vercel. Records at the previous DNS host stop counting the moment Vercel takes over. If mail used to arrive through records there, copy what you still need across before switching, and expect up to a day or two for the switch itself.
- Mail records from a previous provider. If the list already has MX records — from Google Workspace, from a forwarding service — delete them. Two sets of MX records on one domain send some mail each way.
- The records Vercel adds itself. Vercel keeps default records for the website, including a wildcard that answers for any name you have not created. They cannot be removed and do not need to be: a record you add at a name takes precedence at that name. The wildcard does mean a mistyped name still seems to resolve for a website, so check the record's name in the list rather than whether a browser finds something.
- A domain bought through Vercel and never verified. Vercel asks the domain's owner to confirm their contact address after purchase. A domain left unconfirmed is suspended by the registry, and every record on it — mail included — stops answering until it is.
Then, on imado
Back on your domain's page, press Check again. A new record is usually seen within minutes, though Vercel's own documentation allows up to a day, and a name looked up before its record existed can be remembered as missing for about ten minutes. 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.
Vercel's own guide is at vercel.com/docs, and it has a page on setting up email for a Vercel domain.
