If you're planning on contacting your potential audience (voters, donors, site visitors, etc) via email, then you might want to set up email on your website's custom domain - so you can send email from an address that ends in @yourdomain.com. For example, support@winnable.app is an email address set up on our winnable.app domain. This helps with branding, and it clearly communicates who is sending your messages.
Heads up: you may need to pay a fee to your email provider to enable your custom domain to be used for your email address.
You must finish the steps to create a site and add a custom domain before you can complete the following steps.
You must be using a custom domain for your Winnable site in order to use your domain in an email address - you cannot use the default domain provided by Winnable.
GMail
The most common platform for managing an email inbox is probably GMail. Go ahead and create an account with GMail, and make sure to indicate you want to use a custom domain for your email address - this is where you fill in your Winnable website's domain. Then come back to your Winnable dashboard once you've finished creating a GMail account.
Navigate to the Domain Manager in Admin Settings, and then select the domain you just used to create your GMail account. In the center of the screen, select "Add a common mailer or email provider". Here you can select "Google Workspace (Gmail)" and hit "Add DNS Records" to save your progress. Once the page finishes loading, you should see a list of several items with columns "Name", "Type", "Content". and "TTL". This means you're all finished setting up GMail on your domain! You should wait a few hours before you start sending messages - it typically takes some time for a custom email address to be functional.
Other Email Providers
If you can't use GMail as your email provider, then you'll need to understand a few terms to tackle the next steps.
"DNS records" are like address books that allow computers to find and talk to each other, and they allow an email provider to find your domain in Winnable and use it for an email address. DNS records use a bunch of silly terms to describe their contents - you don't need to understand any of these phrases, so long as you know how to copy-paste.
When website content is set up to live at a domain, this is called "hosting". Winnable is your hosting provider because this is the place where you set up your content to live on your domain. A "hosting provider" may also be referred to as a "DNS hosting provider" - this just means that Winnable is where you go to manage the sync between website content and domain.
Create An Account
In order to use an email provider that's not GMail, you'll first need to create an account with that provider. Here is a link to create an account with Microsoft, or you can search for the provider of your choice that offers email with a custom domain.
Add DNS Records
Next, you'll need to manually create a handful of DNS records. You'll accomplish this in your Winnable account, by selecting the domain you want to use for your email address in the Domain Manager of Admin Settings. Find the "Add a custom DNS record" button near the middle of the screen.
Your email provider will have instructions on which records need to be created. Here are the instructions for Microsoft, or you might find a "DNS Records" section in the admin portal if you chose a different provider. These instructions will reference a "hosting provider" or a "DNS hosting provider" - this is referring to your Winnable account.
Each DNS record you create in Winnable will have a few fields you'll need to fill out. We provide all of the fields and options that you might need.
If you run into trouble, feel free to reach out to our team for help.
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