Free Tools
By Fadhil Abdulla

DNS Records Explained: A, CNAME, MX, TXT, SPF and DMARC for Business Owners

What each DNS record does, the setup every business website and email domain needs, and how to check your records in seconds.

Editorial disclosure: Pyalm publishes and maintains the products and free tools discussed on this site. Regulatory statements are linked to primary sources where applicable. No independent professional review is claimed unless a reviewer is explicitly named.

DNS is the internet's address book. When something goes wrong — the website won't load after a migration, emails land in spam, Google can't verify your domain — the answer is almost always in your DNS records.

The records you'll meet

Record Purpose Example
A Points a name to an IPv4 address example.com → 76.76.21.21
AAAA Points a name to an IPv6 address
CNAME Makes one name an alias of another www → cname.vercel-dns.com
MX Which servers receive email for the domain aspmx.l.google.com
TXT Free text — verification, SPF, DMARC, DKIM v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all
NS Which DNS provider is authoritative ns1.cloudflare.com
CAA Which certificate authorities may issue SSL certs 0 issue "letsencrypt.org"
SOA Administrative info about the zone

Email authentication: SPF, DKIM, DMARC

Since 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require bulk senders to authenticate email — and unauthenticated mail from any business is far more likely to land in spam.

  • SPF (a TXT record on the domain) lists the services allowed to send mail for you. Exactly one SPF record; combine services with multiple include: entries.
  • DKIM (a TXT record at selector._domainkey) publishes the key used to sign your mail.
  • DMARC (a TXT record at _dmarc) tells receivers what to do if SPF/DKIM fail. Start with p=none to monitor, then move to quarantine or reject.

Read more in SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained.

Check your records

Enter your domain in the free DNS Lookup. It fetches all common record types at once using Google Public DNS over HTTPS, shows TTLs, and flags a missing or duplicate SPF record and your DMARC policy.

TTL and propagation

Every record has a TTL (time to live) — how long resolvers may cache it. After a change, some users see the old value until the TTL expires. Before a planned migration, lower TTLs to 300 seconds a day in advance; raise them again afterwards.

Common mistakes

  • Two SPF records (invalid — mail fails SPF)
  • CNAME on the root domain (not allowed by the DNS standard; use your provider's ALIAS/flattening)
  • Forgetting the www record after a migration
  • MX records still pointing at an old email provider

SEO and infrastructure, built in

Pyalm builds SEO-first websites for businesses in India and the UAE — technical SEO, structured data, sitemaps, correct DNS and email authentication, and fast hosting — so these checks pass from day one.

WHOIS Lookup | DNS Lookup | Sitemap Generator | Robots.txt Generator | SERP Preview | All free tools

Keep reading

More from Pyalm

Oct 16, 2026

How to Format and Validate JSON (and Fix the 6 Most Common Errors)

Why JSON breaks, how to read a validator's error message, and a quick routine for pretty-printing, minifying and fixing JSON from APIs, logs and config files.

Oct 16, 2026

How to Compare Two JSON Files (Without Drowning in Diff Noise)

Text diffs flag reordered keys and whitespace as changes. Here's how a structural JSON comparison works, and how to use it to review API changes, configs and migrations.

Oct 16, 2026

Regex Cheat Sheet with Real Examples (Emails, Phones, Dates, UAE TRN)

A practical regular expression cheat sheet — the syntax you actually use, plus tested patterns for emails, UAE and Indian phone numbers, dates and tax numbers.

Oct 16, 2026

URL Encoding Explained: %20, + and When to Encode

What percent-encoding is, why spaces become %20, the difference between encodeURI and encodeURIComponent, and how to avoid double-encoding bugs.

Oct 16, 2026

Unix Timestamps Explained: Epoch Time, Seconds vs Milliseconds and Time Zones

What epoch time is, why it's the standard way to store dates, how to tell seconds from milliseconds, and how to avoid the time-zone bugs it causes.

Oct 16, 2026

Minify vs Beautify: What Code Minification Does and When to Use It

How minifying JavaScript, CSS and HTML shrinks files, how much it really saves, and when to beautify minified code to debug it.

Try the free DNS Lookup

Pyalm builds SEO-first websites for businesses in India and the UAE — technical SEO, structured data, fast hosting and the right DNS and email setup from day one.

Open DNS Lookup See website development All free tools