YOWLYOWLA cutover, not a migration — one step at a time, without breaking your domain.
Yowl reads your live MX record, works out who has your mail today, and walks you through the cutover a step at a time. The step nobody warns you about comes first:
Every mail provider keeps its own list of domains it is responsible for. While your domain is on that list, mail sent from inside that provider never looks up your MX record at all. External mail moves to Yowl immediately; mail between your own colleagues silently does not.
| Provider | What has to change on their side |
|---|---|
| Google Workspace | Turn the Gmail service off for the domain |
| Microsoft 365 | Accepted domain from Authoritative to Internal relay — and remove the mailboxes, or Exchange keeps delivering to them anyway |
| Zoho Mail | Turn Mail Hosting off for the domain |
| cPanel hosting | Email Routing from Local to Remote Mail Exchanger — otherwise the server swallows everything, including your own website's contact form |
Yowl's records were chosen so a cutover touches exactly one thing you already have. The DKIM key is selector-scoped and sits beside your old provider's. The SPF record lives on asend. subdomain, so your apex SPF is never touched — which removes the usual way a self-serve migration breaks a domain, two SPF records at the apex failing every message you send. Only the root MX replaces anything, and that is the cutover itself.
We will not ask you to weaken DMARC for the move either. DMARC governs mail claiming to befrom you; it has no bearing on mail arriving at you, so an inbound cutover cannot be broken by it. Advice to set p=none for a week just leaves you spoofable for a week.
This is a cutover, not a migration. New mail arrives at Yowl; everything already in your old mailbox stays there. Keep that account open and paid for at least a week afterwards — senders and security gateways cache MX records for a day or two regardless of what you publish, and mail already queued to the old host keeps retrying there for days. None of that tail comes to us.
Without a DMARC policy, receivers have no way to tell your real mail from a forgery, and since 2024 the large mailbox providers effectively expect one. The fix is a DNS record; knowing what to paste, when to tighten, and whether it worked is the part nobody hands you.
Yowl shows one rung at a time — what is done, what is next, and nothing else. Start by monitoring, which changes nothing about delivery. Reports come back to an address on your own domain, which Yowl already hosts, so there is nothing extra to set up. When they have been clean for a couple of weeks, Yowl says so, and you tighten. It stays advisory: we never touch your DNS, you paste.
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