Our Team’s CRM has suggested that we authenicate our email domain by entering some new DNS records into our account. This seems as if it would be fairly simple if not for the following:
Our domain is said to be currently hosted out of cloudflare, but we do not have an existing account. Our name servers reflect cloudflare, seeing as they both say “Cloudflare” in them, but when trying to create a new account and transfer our domain into Cloudflare, Cloudflare has said that we must change our name servers. I have attempted to contact Cloudflare in order to figure out the best steps following, and what exactly changing our nameservers means for what’s hosted under our domain (emails/websites/records) because we have been told that changing our name servers will completely wipe the information we have now. I have been frustrated with the lack of assistance that support has been, as they cannot provide any more information for this.
I would like to know whether or not our existing information will be wiped, and if there’s a way to prevent this or if there is a way to avoid it.
Really, all we have to do is add a few DNS records to our domain, which are already preset and provided by our CRM, but this has become a much more difficult task than I was expecting. Can someone please help provide clarity?
If your domain is using Cloudflare, then you need to find out who set this up for you so you can access the account with the current settings in.
You can try to recover the account here to see if someone involved gets the reminder by going to the dashboard and pressing “Forgot your email?” here… https://dash.cloudflare.com
Or, as you say, you can create a new account and change the nameservers at your registrar to those to take control of the DNS but you will need to find out the DNS records required for your web and mail hosting to enter yourself. (The information in the old account won’t be “wiped” but it won’t be in your new account).
Setting the nameservers are how you authenticate with Cloudflare that you own the domain. Giving you the information or records for another account is a security issue.
Your real frustration should come from the apparent lack of documentation of the infrastructure and service providers that your organisation uses to host your web assets.
It seems you’re just now discovering that your site even uses Cloudflare. But that didn’t happen by chance: someone in or hired by your organization – who has access to your domain – did this.