What is a domain?

The simplest way to think of a domain is as the address for you and your brand on the internet. Your domain is what people will type into their browser or even search to find you through a search engine such as Google, DuckDuckGo, or Bing. For example, when you log in to your Mailchimp account, you go to https://mailchimp.com/, which is their domain.

You also might have noticed a distinction between a private domain and a public email domain. Public domains are generally domains that belong to another company, where they provide you with a free email address and they act as your receiving email service provider. Really common examples that you are probably familiar with are domains such as Gmail or Yahoo. These are domains where you may own or have access to a single local address at the domain, but you don’t own the domain itself.

The purpose of this distinction is that with a public domain, you can’t make changes to the authentication of the...