← All series
How I Built johnmcdougal.com
How this Astro site, its analytics, and its custom-domain email infrastructure were built and hardened.
- Part 1How I Built johnmcdougal.com with Claude and AstroBuilding this site with Claude wasn't about delegating the work -- it was about having a thinking partner who helped me make real decisions and ship something instead of planning forever.
- Part 2Custom Email Routing with Cloudflare and SMTP2GoCustom domain email without Google Workspace: Cloudflare handles inbound for free, SMTP2Go handles outbound, and Gmail ties it together.
- Part 3Setting Up PostHog Analytics on a Static Site (and Fixing What the Wizard Broke)PostHog Cloud + a Cloudflare reverse proxy gives you real analytics without Google -- but skip the AI wizard and read the docs first.
- Part 4SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: the full lockdown after setting up custom emailSMTP2Go's wizard gives you SPF. That's one of three records. Here's how to add DKIM and DMARC -- in the right order -- and why the order matters.
- Part 5Do your parked domains need email authentication? Yes -- and it's four records.A domain you never use for email can still be spoofed. Four DNS records fix it: null MX, SPF reject-all, DMARC reject, wildcard DKIM null. No key generation, no sending infrastructure.
- Part 6How I read DMARC reports without reading DMARC reportsDMARC aggregate reports are XML zip files emailed by mail servers worldwide. Postmark DMARC Digests parses them and sends you a clean weekly summary -- free, no Postmark account required.