I have 2 x CNAME records I need to add — both have ‘bounce’ in the Name. I am getting an error saying this is not possible. (They are for email on third-party platforms).
I have read the help article from the error notification, and it says " Cloudflare prevents you from creating this combination of records because if a CNAME record is provided for a hostname DNS servers expect only that CNAME record to provide DNS information for that hostname."
I understand this, but would anyone know of a workaround for this type of issue?
For some context of our problem.
The 1st CNAME record is for email of Stripe when our clients pay subscriptions.
The 2nd CNAME record is for a white-label client portal to send emails for chat notifications.
You cannot have two DNS records sharing both the exact same record type (e.g. CNAME) with the exact same name/label (e.g. bounce).
The actual name (e.g. bounce) does not matter technically, it could literally be anything, so if you use the one for regular mails, you could select mail on that platform, but for the platform you use for newsletters, if you’re sending out such, you could eventually select newsletters, or many other combinations.
You will however need to contact at least one of those two email platforms, and have them re-assign the name in their system, so you get two different names.
Hi @DarkDeviL, thank you for taking the time to provide a comprehensive answer.
I did not know the provider ‘may’ be able to re-assign the name. We will reach out to them and see if they can change this for us.
It may vary a bit from platform to platform, on some platform you can select the name yourself (at least: during the initial set up), on others, it may be a bit strict.
As an illustration, - given we’re talking about email platforms:
At least during the last time I set up DKIM on Google Workspace, you could like free-form choose the name for your DKIM selector.
E.g. the field defaulted to google (google._domainkey.example.com for the full name of the TXT record), however, if you wanted, you could choose the current date, e.g. 20230907 (20230907._domainkey.example.com) as well.
In addition, I have also seen some systems that appear mandate the use of the DKIM selector named “default”, e.g. as default._domainkey.example.com.
So in the end, it can depend quite a bit on the individual platform and their (good|silly) choices.
Interesting. We have Stripe setup, but did not check to see if we could change it. Just checked the new CNAME details on the client portal we’re setting up and we can not change it. But as it is newer and we’re just setting this up, we’ll contact them first.
Again, thank you
UPDATE
We have got onto Stripe support and our client portal support.
Stripe is still looking into the solution to see if they can change a CNAME name record and will get back to us, whereas our client portal dev team changed the CNAME record for us.
Our Stripe custom email CNAME name is > bounce.
Our client portal custom email CNAME name was bounce, but it has now been changed to > emailbounce.
Our records are all verified and working
Big shout out to @DarkDeviL for suggesting we could change the name.
If you had not provided the information on this, I would have never known you could change a CNAME name record. Thank you V-much for your superb support
UPDATE
For informational purposes, I’ll post a last reply about the response I got back from Stripe about changing CNAME name records.
“Upon further checking your query with our technical team, I’m afraid we currently don’t support this feature of changing CNAME record. It may not be possible for now, but I’ll certainly note this for future feedback on service / product improvement”.
~ Stripe
This documentation sounds to me like it is actually possible, you will just have to follow the “Change email domains” advice, and go through the “Add your domain” procedure again, verifying the new domain.
Then, instead of taking bounce.example.com during that “Add your domain” procedure, you just choose e.g. billing.example.com, or invoices.example.com.
