All help  ·  Plain text for an AI assistant

Where your review requests come from

Step 3 of setting up Kudos. It has the most moving parts of the six, because one of the two paths through it involves changing your DNS.

Nothing is sent to any of your clients until you finish step 6.

What this step decides

Every review request Kudos sends on your behalf has to come from somewhere. You choose one of two options, and the choice changes what your client sees in their inbox.

Neither option is better. They trade convenience against how the email looks.

If you are not sure, pick use our domain. You can change to your own domain later.

Option A: use our domain

1. On step 3, press Choose this under "Use our domain".
2. Enter a reply-to address. This is where a reply from a client lands. Use the address you actually read, not a no-reply address. Clients do reply to these emails, usually to say thank you, and occasionally to ask a question about the invoice.
3. Press Save.
4. Press Check my sending setup.

Do not enter a send-from address on this path. There is no box for it, because Kudos assigns its own. If you somehow submit one, you will see:

The shared option assigns its own sending address, so leave that box empty.

The one wait on this path

After saving, step 3 may show:

We check your practice ourselves before your first send. Nothing to do here; we will be in touch.

This is not an error and there is nothing you can do to speed it up. Kudos checks that a real practice is behind a new account before letting it send on a shared domain, because one bad sender would affect every other practice using it.

We do this within one business day, Monday to Friday, Australian Eastern time. If you have not heard from us by then, email support and quote your practice name.

You can complete steps 4 and 5 while this is outstanding. Only step 6 waits on it.

Option B: use your own domain

Your clients see an email from your own practice address. To let Kudos send as you, your domain has to say so publicly, which means four records in your DNS.

Before you start

You need to be able to log in to whoever manages your domain's DNS. That is usually one of:

• the company you bought the domain from (GoDaddy, Crazy Domains, VentraIP, Netregistry)
• Cloudflare, if someone set that up for you
• your web developer

If you cannot log in to that, stop here and use option A instead. You will not be able to finish this path, and there is no way around it.

Check one thing first

If your DNS is managed by Squarespace, this path will not work. Squarespace's DNS editor accepts only two parts in a record name, and the records Kudos needs have three. This is a limitation of Squarespace, not of Kudos, and waiting will not fix it. Your options are to move DNS management elsewhere or to use option A.

The steps

1. On step 3, press Choose this under "Use your own domain".
2. Enter the address you want to send from, on your own domain. For example reviews@smithandco.com.au or hello@smithandco.com.au. It does not need to be a mailbox that exists.
3. Press Save.
4. Press Get my DNS record. Kudos gives you one TXT record. This is how Kudos proves you actually control the domain you just claimed.
5. Publish that record (see your registrar below), then come back and press Check my sending setup.
6. Once ownership is confirmed, the same button shows three more records, all of type CNAME. Publish those too.
7. Press Check my sending setup again. When all four are live and confirmed, step 3 is done.

You will press Check my sending setup several times. That is expected: it only reads, and it never re-issues anything.

What the four records look like

The exact values are shown on your own step 3 screen and are unique to your practice. Always copy them from the screen, never from this page. The shapes are:

The three CNAMEs each have a different random value. They are not interchangeable and all three are required.

How DNS panels change the Name field

Most DNS control panels add your domain to the end of whatever you type in the Name field.

So if Kudos shows you a record named:

abc123._domainkey.smithandco.com.au

and you paste that whole thing into GoDaddy's Name box, GoDaddy stores:

abc123._domainkey.smithandco.com.au.smithandco.com.au

which points at nothing. Kudos then reports, correctly and forever, that it cannot find your record.

The fix: paste only the part before your domain. For the example above, that is:

abc123._domainkey

and for the TXT record:

_kudos-verify

Every registrar in the list below behaves this way except Cloudflare, which accepts either form and works it out.

Registrar instructions

GoDaddy

1. Log in, then open My Products.
2. Find your domain and press DNS.
3. Press Add New Record.
4. Type: choose TXT (or CNAME for the last three).
5. Name: the part before your domain only. See the section above.
6. Value: paste exactly what Kudos showed. For a CNAME, GoDaddy calls this field Points to.
7. TTL: leave the default (1 hour).
8. Save, and repeat for each record.

Crazy Domains

1. Log in and open My Account, then Domain Names.
2. Press Manage next to your domain, then DNS.
3. Press Add Record.
4. Choose the type, enter the name without your domain, paste the value.
5. Save, and repeat.

Crazy Domains sometimes shows a warning about changing DNS affecting your email. Adding these four records does not affect your existing email. You are adding records, not replacing any.

VentraIP

1. Log in to VIPControl.
2. Open Domain Names, press Manage on your domain.
3. Open DNS, then Edit DNS Zone.
4. Press Add Record, choose the type, enter the name without your domain, paste the value.
5. Save, and repeat.

Cloudflare

1. Log in and select your domain.
2. Open DNS, then Records, then Add record.
3. Choose the type, enter the name, paste the value.
4. Turn the proxy off. For each of the three CNAME records, the Proxy status toggle must show a grey cloud reading "DNS only", not an orange cloud. If it is orange, Cloudflare answers with its own record instead of the one you entered, and verification will never succeed.
5. Save, and repeat.

The orange cloud is the single most common reason a Cloudflare-hosted domain fails this step.

Someone else manages my DNS

Send them this, replacing the values with the ones on your step 3 screen:

Please add the following DNS records to yourdomain.com.au. These authorise our review request emails and do not affect existing mail.

1. TXT record, name _kudos-verify, value <paste>
2. CNAME record, name <paste>._domainkey, value <paste>.dkim.amazonses.com
3. CNAME record, name <paste>._domainkey, value <paste>.dkim.amazonses.com
4. CNAME record, name <paste>._domainkey, value <paste>.dkim.amazonses.com

If your control panel appends the domain automatically, enter the names exactly as above without the domain. If the domain is on Cloudflare, these must be set to "DNS only", not proxied.

How long DNS takes

Usually two to fifteen minutes. Occasionally up to an hour. Very rarely, if your registrar sets a long TTL, up to 24 hours.

Press Check my sending setup after ten minutes. If nothing has changed after an hour, the record is almost certainly wrong rather than slow, and the host-field mistake above is the first thing to check.

What each message means

Kudos tells you exactly what is wrong. Find the sentence you saw.

Messages about what is still missing

Messages when saving your choice

Messages when checking

If you are using an AI assistant

You can paste this whole page into Claude, ChatGPT or similar and ask it to walk you through. It will be able to help with most of it.

What it can do for you

• Work out who manages your DNS, from your domain name
• Read the four records off a screenshot of your step 3 screen and tell you exactly what to type into each field of your registrar's form
• Tell you whether a record has gone live yet
• Explain any message you have seen

What it cannot do

• Log in to Kudos, your registrar, or Xero. Those need your password, and you should not give it one.
• See your step 3 screen unless you show it a screenshot.

A useful thing to ask it:

Here is a screenshot of the DNS records Kudos wants me to publish, and my DNS is managed by [registrar]. Tell me exactly what to type into each field, remembering that [registrar] adds my domain to the end of the Name field automatically.