Your campaign's domain and email, explained

The short version: every Electbase site launches on a free address like yourname.electbase.com, and you can connect your own domain — yourname.com — whenever you're ready. Either way, your site is served over HTTPS with the padlock, automatically. If you plan to send campaign email from your own domain, there's one more piece worth doing early: email authentication. Here's what all of that means in plain English.

Your free Electbase address

The moment your site exists, it's live at yourname.electbase.com. That's a real, secure, shareable address — fine for getting started, fine for a QR code on a palm card. Plenty of campaigns launch on it and connect a custom domain later.

Bringing (or buying) your own domain

A custom domain — janedoeforcouncil.com — looks more established, fits on yard signs better, and is yours to keep after the race. You have two paths:

• You already own one. Connect it from your dashboard — the steps are below.
• You need one. Buy it right from your dashboard (see "Buying a domain through Electbase" below), or from any registrar (Cloudflare, Porkbun, Namecheap, GoDaddy, usually $10–20/year) and connect it the same way. Either way, pick something short, spellable, and sayable out loud. You'll be saying it at every door.

Buying a domain through Electbase

On Grassroots and up, the Custom domain card offers Buy a new domain next to Connect one you already own.

1. Type the name you want and press Check availability. You can buy a .com, .net or .org here. For anything else, like .us or .vote, buy it at a registrar and connect it.
2. See the price. On annual billing, the domain is included at no charge for as long as your annual plan is active, and we renew it for you each year. On monthly billing, you pay the registrar's cost: about $11 for a .com the first year, and the same each year after. We email you before each renewal, and nothing renews until you pay for it.
3. Enter the registrant details. Use the committee's name and filing address. The domain is registered in the committee's name, not Electbase's, and the registrar keeps those contact details private.
4. Agree to the terms and register. On annual billing, the button registers the domain immediately. On monthly billing, it takes you to payment first.

That's it. There are no DNS records to add: Electbase sets them up at the registrar, so the card moves straight to connecting, then to Active, the same way a connected domain does. You'll get an email when it's live.

It's your domain. The card shows who it's registered to and when it renews. You can ask for a transfer authorization code at any time after the first 60 days (every new registration has a 60-day transfer lock under ICANN rules), and move the domain to any registrar. We send the code to the registrant email, normally within one business day.

If your subscription ends, we stop renewing the domain. We email you 60, 30 and 7 days before it expires, so you can renew it or transfer it out. The full terms are in section 8A of our Terms of Service.

Connecting your domain, step by step

1. Open the Custom domain card in your dashboard and enter your domain — janedoeforcouncil.com, no https://, no www.
2. Electbase shows you your DNS records. Copy them exactly as shown. A whole domain (janedoeforcouncil.com) gets three; a subdomain (vote.janedoeforcouncil.com) gets two — there's no separate A record or www twin to add:
   • a verification record (a CNAME starting with _acme-challenge) that proves to the certificate authority you control the domain,
   • whole domain: an A record at the root of your domain, pointing at Electbase's address, plus a www CNAME so www.janedoeforcouncil.com works too,
   • subdomain: a CNAME pointing your subdomain at yourname.electbase.com instead.
3. Add the records at your registrar — wherever you bought the domain, in its DNS or "Manage DNS" screen. Leave the TTL at whatever the default is.
4. Press Check status. Electbase looks for your records, and once it sees them, requests your security certificate.
5. Wait. Typically a few minutes; occasionally up to an hour if your registrar is slow to publish changes. You don't have to sit on the page — Electbase re-checks on its own every half hour and finishes the job whether or not you're watching.
6. Done. The card reads Active and your site answers on your domain over https://.

Your old yourname.electbase.com links and QR codes keep working — they redirect to your new domain automatically, so anything already printed stays good. (If you ever disconnect your domain, that redirect goes away and yourname.electbase.com starts serving your site directly again — see "Disconnecting your domain" below for what to do with your custom domain's own DNS records.)

If it's taking longer than an hour

Almost every stuck connection is one of two things, and both are at your registrar rather than on our side:

• The verification record got mangled. Many registrars automatically append your domain to whatever you type in the "name" field, so pasting _acme-challenge.janedoeforcouncil.com produces _acme-challenge.janedoeforcouncil.com.janedoeforcouncil.com. If your registrar does that, enter just _acme-challenge. Check the saved record afterward — what's stored is what matters, not what you typed.
• Your domain isn't using your registrar's DNS. If you've pointed the domain's nameservers somewhere else (Cloudflare is the usual one), add the records there instead. Records added in the wrong place are invisible to everyone, including us.

Leave the card open or come back later — once the records are right, the next automatic re-check picks them up without you doing anything else. If it's still stuck after that, send us the domain and we'll look at what our end can see.

We hold the claim for 14 days. If the records never show up in that time, Electbase releases the claim and emails you — your site keeps serving at your electbase.com address the whole time, and you can connect the domain again whenever you're ready.

Disconnecting your domain

Disconnecting only tells Electbase to stop routing and securing your domain — it doesn't touch DNS. Your yourname.electbase.com address starts working directly again right away, but your custom domain does not quietly go back to "unhosted." Once it's disconnected, the certificate and routing are gone, so the domain will fail to load — a broken connection, not a friendly redirect — until you remove the records you added for it.

After you disconnect, go back to your registrar and remove:

• the _acme-challenge verification CNAME,
• the A record at the root of your domain (or the subdomain CNAME, if you connected a subdomain), and
• the www CNAME, if you added one.

Leave everything else exactly as it is — in particular, disconnecting never touches MX records, same as connecting. Your email keeps working whether or not the domain is connected to Electbase.

If you're switching custom domains rather than dropping one, you don't need to do any of this first — just connect the new domain, then clean up the old records once the new one is live.

Email from your domain

A custom domain unlocks matching email — jane@janedoeforcouncil.com instead of a Gmail address. It reads as more professional on fundraising asks and press outreach, and it keeps campaign mail out of your personal inbox.

Electbase doesn't provide inboxes, and connecting your domain to Electbase doesn't create any. Mail is a separate service you set up with a provider — Google Workspace is the common path (roughly $7–$8.50/user/month depending on plan and commitment — check Google's current pricing), and Microsoft 365, Fastmail and Zoho all work the same way.

It's also what Meta asks for before you can run political ads. When your committee sets up the "Paid for by" disclaimer for Facebook and Instagram ads, every option that puts your committee's name on it needs an email address on the same domain as your website — and your homepage has to show that exact name. Your site's footer disclaimer puts your committee's name on every page, homepage included, so make sure it matches, letter for letter, the name you give Meta. A Gmail address won't do it. If paid social is anywhere in your plans, set up the domain email first; our guide to getting verified for Meta political ads walks through the rest.

The important part: connecting your domain to Electbase never touches your email. The records we ask you to add are for your website only. Your MX records — the ones that route mail — stay exactly as they are, and we will never ask you to change them. If you already have email on your domain, it keeps working through the switch, uninterrupted.

Email authentication: the part campaigns skip (and shouldn't)

Before you send campaign email from your domain — newsletters, fundraising asks, volunteer blasts — set up three DNS records: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. This matters for two reasons:

1. Deliverability. Major mail providers increasingly filter or reject mail from domains without authentication. Unauthenticated campaign email lands in spam — which means the fundraising ask you wrote never gets seen.
2. Spoofing protection. Without these records, anyone can send email that appears to come from your campaign's domain. Political campaigns are targets for exactly this. Authentication lets receiving servers reject the fakes.

In plain English:

• SPF is a public list of which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain. Mail from anywhere else fails the check.
• DKIM puts a cryptographic signature on each message proving it really came from you and wasn't altered along the way.
• DMARC is the policy that ties them together: it tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails (let it through, quarantine it, or reject it) and sends you reports on who's sending mail claiming to be you.

Each one is a DNS record you add at your registrar — the same place you pointed your domain at Electbase. Your email provider (Google Workspace, or whatever email-blast tool you use) gives you the exact values to paste in; it's a 15-minute job, and you do it once.

Your email tool has its own version of this — and “verified” isn’t the same as authenticated

Mailchimp, and most tools like it, have two separate settings that are easy to mistake for each other:

• Verifying a domain (or an address) means you clicked a code Mailchimp emailed you. It proves you own the address, and it lets you use it as your From address. That is all it does.
• Authenticating a domain is the DKIM and SPF setup above. It is what makes Mailchimp send mail as your domain instead of as itself.

Verify without authenticating and your mail still goes out from Mailchimp’s own shared sending domain. It works — it just doesn’t come from you, and shared sending domains are exactly what spam filters have learned to distrust.

Where this bites hardest is your sign-up confirmations. Mailchimp, by default, adds a new contact as pending and emails them a link to confirm. That is a good thing — a confirmed opt-in is your proof of consent, and it is what keeps your account in good standing. But a pending contact becomes a subscriber only when somebody clicks that link. If the confirmation lands in a junk folder, nobody clicks, the contact stays pending indefinitely, and your list quietly stops growing while every sign-up looks like it worked. An unauthenticated sending domain is the most common reason those confirmations get filtered.

So do the same two things at your email tool that you did for your own mail: turn on domain authentication, and add the DNS records it hands you at your registrar. Then send yourself a test sign-up and check where the confirmation lands — including the junk folder.

Electbase checks this for you too: when you pick your Mailchimp audience under Connections, we ask Mailchimp which of your domains are authenticated and say so on the spot if none of them are.

The order to do things

1. Launch on your free yourname.electbase.com address — day one, no setup.
2. Buy or bring your custom domain and connect it (dashboard → Custom domain → add the records shown, two or three depending on whether you're connecting a whole domain or a subdomain → Check status). SSL happens automatically; the whole thing usually finishes inside a few minutes.
3. Set up name@yourdomain email with a mailbox provider (Google Workspace is the common path). This is separate from Electbase and doesn't disturb your site.
4. Add SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records before your first email blast from the domain — including turning on domain authentication inside each blast tool you send from.

Email-authentication checklist

The checklist version of the section above — work down it before your first blast:

• Custom domain connected to Electbase and resolving over HTTPS.
• Mailbox provider chosen (Google Workspace is the common path) and name@yourdomain receiving mail.
• SPF record added (one TXT at the root): include your mailbox provider and every blast tool you send from, e.g. v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:servers.mcsv.net ~all (Mailchimp shown; use YOUR tools' documented include values — one SPF record only; merge includes, never add a second record).
• DKIM enabled at each sending service (Workspace Admin → Gmail → Authenticate email; in Mailchimp it is domain authentication, which is a different setting from verifying a domain — see above) and each CNAME/TXT they hand you added at the registrar.
• DMARC record added (TXT at _dmarc.yourdomain): start at v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:you@yourdomain to collect reports, then tighten to p=quarantine once reports run clean for 2–4 weeks.
• Verified with a checker (e.g. a mail-tester service or your provider's toolbox) BEFORE the first blast: SPF pass, DKIM pass, DMARC pass.
• Re-check after adding any new sending tool — every new sender needs to enter the SPF include list and get its own DKIM key.