What is a DNS Administrator?
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You've set up your ESP, you've got your domain ready, and then someone says "you'll need your DNS administrator to publish those records." If that sentence just made you blink, you're not alone.
A DNS Administrator is the person (or team) responsible for managing your domain's DNS records. DNS, short for Domain Name System, is essentially the address book of the internet. It maps your domain name to the servers and services that domain uses, including email.
For email specifically, DNS administrators handle the records that make your sending trustworthy and deliverable. That means publishing and maintaining your SPF record (which tells receiving servers which IPs are allowed to send on your behalf), your DKIM keys (which sign outgoing messages so they can't be tampered with in transit), your DMARC policy (which tells receiving servers what to do when SPF or DKIM fails), and your MX records (which point inbound mail to the right server).
If any of those records are wrong, missing, or outdated, your emails can fail authentication checks. And failed authentication means deliverability problems, even if everything else in your setup is perfect.
In practice, a DNS administrator might be your IT department, your hosting provider's support team, or a dedicated infrastructure engineer at a larger company. At smaller organizations, it's often whoever set up the domain in the first place (sometimes that's you). What matters is that this person has login access to your DNS management panel, the knowledge to edit records safely, and an understanding of how changes can affect email flow.
The relationship between email senders and DNS administrators is often where authentication setup stalls. You know what records need to be published. They know how to publish them. Getting both sides to speak the same language (and act on it quickly) is one of those unglamorous but genuinely critical coordination tasks in email deliverability.
If you're not sure whether your authentication records are set up correctly, you can check your SPF with our free SPF checker or your DMARC record with the DMARC generator. Both are free, no signup needed.
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