How to set up DKIM on Beget

Setting up DKIM on Beget comes down to two moves: get the selector and the public key from whoever runs your mailboxes, then publish that key as a DNS record wherever your domain’s DNS is answered. The record comes first on this page because a person who can read one can tell a good paste from a broken one.

Beget is the DNS host and, for many of its customers, the registrar and web host as well. It publishes whatever DKIM record the mailbox provider hands you; it does not generate, sign or rotate the key or choose the selector name.

What DKIM proves, and where the key has to live

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) puts a signature on each message sent from your domain. The mail platform signs with a private key it keeps to itself. The receiving server pulls the selector out of the DKIM-Signature header, looks up <selector>._domainkey.yourdomain.com in DNS, and checks the signature against the public key it finds there. A match tells the receiver two things: the message came from a system holding your private key, and nobody changed the body or the signed headers on the way.

That lookup is why the record goes where your DNS lives. Receivers don’t ask your mail platform for the key, and they don’t ask your registrar unless it happens to run the zone. They ask whichever nameservers your domain delegates to, and only the copy held there counts. The DKIM guide covers the check from the receiver’s side; this page covers the publishing side.

Two parties share the record and neither can do the other’s part. The mail platform generates the key pair inside its own console, keeps the private half, signs outgoing mail with it, and hands you the public half plus a selector. The DNS host publishes what you paste and has no way to invent a value that would verify.

Beget publishes exactly the record you paste into the subzone, once you have created the subzone and saved the TXT or CNAME value. It does not add the second Microsoft 365 selector for you and does not contact the mail provider on your behalf; each subzone has to be created and filled in separately.

The record, tag by tag

Most platforms hand you a TXT record. Its value is a short run of tags separated by semicolons, and a typical one begins v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p= followed by the key. v=DKIM1 names the version and, when present, has to come first. k=rsa names the key type; k=ed25519 exists, and a platform that supports it will say so. p= carries the public key itself, hundreds of characters of base64 with no spaces, and it’s the one tag a receiver insists on.

Three optional tags matter. t=y marks the key as testing, so receivers treat a failed signature as if the message carried none. t=s says the identity in the signature has to be your domain itself, with no subdomain in front of it. h=sha256 limits the hash to the algorithm receivers use anyway.

Start with the value as your platform issued it, character for character, and don’t tidy it. Once mail is flowing, tighten in two places. If t=y is present, remove it so a failure counts as a failure. If the platform offers a 2048-bit key alongside a 1024-bit one, pick 2048, since it’s the length platforms now issue by default and receivers accept it.

Rotation stays the platform’s job: when it issues a new key under a new selector, you publish the new record and leave the old one up until nothing signs with it any more.

Some platforms give you a CNAME instead. The name is still <selector>._domainkey, and the target is a host on the platform’s own servers that holds the TXT value, which lets the platform rotate keys without you touching DNS again. If you were given a CNAME, publish a CNAME. Converting the target into a TXT record publishes a hostname where receivers expect a key.

The selector is the half people underrate. A receiver builds its lookup from the s= tag in the header, so the name you publish has to match the one the platform signs with, letter for letter. selector1 and selector2 are different keys, and so are mail and mail1. For DMARC alignment the d= in the signature also has to be your domain or a subdomain of it.

Confirm who answers DNS for your domain

A record saved in a console that your domain doesn’t delegate to is invisible to receivers, whatever that console reports.

A DKIM record only works where the domain’s nameservers point. Beget’s nameservers are the default for a domain registered or hosted at Beget, so if you never changed them you are in the right console. If the nameservers point at Cloudflare, another host or the email provider instead, the record has to go there, not in Beget.

Add the record in Beget

Copy both pieces from the platform’s DKIM or email authentication page and keep that tab open until the check at the end passes. Laid out the way Beget expects it, the record looks like this:

TXT: v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=[the long key your mail provider generated]
CNAME: [the ...onmicrosoft.com target your mail provider generated]

The subzone name field takes the selector alone, google._domainkey or selector1._domainkey, never the full domain, because Beget appends the domain automatically and doubling it up creates a broken host. The record type field in the Quick add block takes TXT for most providers or CNAME for Microsoft 365. The data field takes the TXT key beginning v=DKIM1; or the CNAME target ending onmicrosoft.com, pasted in full. Beget does not ask for a TTL on this record in the source.

Sign in to the Beget control panel and open the DNS section.
Select your domain in the list at the top of the DNS section.
Click Добавить подзону, meaning Add subzone, to start a new subzone.
Name the subzone after the selector host alone, for example google._domainkey or selector1._domainkey.
Select the new subzone in the list, then click Открыть режим редактирования, meaning Open editing mode.
In the Быстрое добавление block, meaning Quick add, set the record type to TXT or to CNAME to match what your provider gave you.
Paste the value your provider gave you into the data field for that record.
Save the record, then repeat the whole subzone process for selector2._domainkey if Microsoft 365 issued two records.

Before you save, compare the last few characters of the pasted value with the platform’s page, because a copy that stops early publishes a key that will never verify, and the console won’t warn you. Check the selector in the name against the platform’s page in the same pass.

A few traps are specific to Beget:

Beget has no free-form Host box on the main record form. The selector host has to exist as its own subzone before you can attach a record to it, and skipping that step is the most common failure.
Typing the full domain into the subzone name, such as google._domainkey.yourdomain.com, doubles the domain once Beget appends it and produces a host that never resolves.
The console labels are in Russian: Добавить подзону, Открыть режим редактирования and Быстрое добавление. Confirm the exact wording in your own console before you click.
Adding a TXT record where the provider issued CNAME records, or the reverse, means DKIM never validates even though a record is published.
The key is hundreds of characters long, and a stray space, a line break or a truncated paste breaks it in ways that look identical to a correct key at a glance.

Save, then wait, then check

The source gives no Beget-specific propagation window; DNS changes generally take minutes up to a couple of hours before DKIM starts validating. The saved record appears against the subzone you created, under the domain’s DNS section.

Once the record shows in the console, run the free scan against your domain. It asks DNS for the selector the way a receiving server does and tells you in plain words whether the key is published and readable.

A second check closes the loop. Send a message from the domain to a mailbox you control and open the Authentication-Results header. dkim=pass with your domain in header.d= means the signature verified against the key you published. dkim=fail or dkim=none with the record in place points at the selector or at the platform side, and the next section says where to look.

When the key is missing or malformed

Without a record at the selector, the receiver gets no key and the message carries no verified signature. It won’t bounce on that alone, though DMARC then has only SPF to lean on, and SPF breaks on forwarding, so the quote a customer forwards to a colleague arrives with neither.

A malformed record fails in the same quiet way: a p= value cut short, a stray space or line break in the middle, a doubled host such as mail._domainkey.yourdomain.com.yourdomain.com, or a selector that’s off by one character, and the receiver logs dkim=fail or dkim=permerror and moves on. You hear nothing unless DMARC reports are arriving, and the DMARC piece shows how those reports expose a DKIM failure per sending source.

The census shows how ordinary that silence is. Of the 75,823,110 domains where the September 2026 census could run the DKIM check, it found a key at a known selector on 37,999,462 (50.1%). That check works the way any checker does: there’s no way to list the DKIM records on a domain, so it can only ask for selectors it knows to try, and a platform with an unusual selector can read as absent when the key is fine.

If your scan reports nothing found while the record sits in the console, finding your DKIM selector shows how to read the live selector out of a sent message’s headers before you change anything.

Work a failure in order: the selector spelling first, the nameservers second, then the tail of the pasted value, then whether the platform still needs you to switch signing on.

Figures as of 5 September 2026, from the September 2026 edition of the defaults.exposed census. Census numbers move every month; the current values are on the census data page.