Can I Set a SOA in the Domain I'm Creating?
Linode
Linode Staff
I am setting up my domain in the DNS Manager and I would like to use an email in that domain itself as the SOA so I'm not exposing my personal address. But when I try to set it up I receive the error message Please choose an SOA email address that does not belong to the target Domain. Is there a way to set my SOA address to use my preferred domain?
1 Reply
tbaka
Linode Staff
I completely understand not wanting to have your personal email available to anyone who wants to run a whois against your URL. We do have a restriction in place to prevent an email tied to the Apex domain being used as the SOA as a precaution against having a built in single point of failure.
Ideally, the SOA will reach you but is outside of your domain and doesn't require the Linode to be running. Imagine someone is trying to email you that the domain is down. If the email is down along with the domain it won't be much help.
That being said, the simplest work around is to use a subdomain of the FQDN. So, if you are creating example.com the SOA admin@example.com isn't going to work but admin@mail.example.com will. Another alternative would be to just create a new address on on a third party service that is just your SOA. Frankly, this would be my recommendation.
But you are absolutely welcome to set up your Domain however works best for you!