Frequently asked questions

You might have noticed that when we generate zone files, we canonicalise whatever you enter into the hostname field on records that have it (like CNAME and MX) by adding a . at the end if one was not added by you.

We do this, because only people with a deep understanding of DNS would know to add the . themselves. While a DNS server would expect mail.test to be a non-qualified domain name, and if you added such a host name to a CNAME on your example.com. zone, it would be interpreted as mail.test.example.com. – but URLs and most other tools using host names do not follow this convention.

So we have decided to apply the principle of least astonishment and interpret all host names as canonical by default. You enter the host name as mail.test.@ if you want it to be relative to the zone name. This is also very useful when working with rule sets.