If you've set up Zoho Mail or verified a domain in Zoho, you've almost certainly been asked to "add a DNS record" at some point. Here's what that actually means, and why it's worth understanding rather than just copying and pasting values you don't recognise.
DNS stands for Domain Name System, and the simplest way to think of it is as the internet's phone book. Computers don't naturally understand "yourcompany.com", they work with numerical addresses instead. DNS is the system that looks up a human-friendly name like your domain and translates it into the numerical address a computer actually needs, and it also stores various other instructions about how that domain should behave.
When you use your own domain with Zoho, for email, verification, or certain integrations, Zoho needs a way to prove that you genuinely own that domain, and it needs to tell the rest of the internet where your emails should actually be delivered. Both of these are done by adding specific entries, called records, into your domain's DNS settings, usually managed through whichever company you registered your domain with (such as GoDaddy, Cloudflare, or 123-reg).