Personal Assistant User Guide.

A complete reference for the AI-powered Personal Assistant on domain.co.nz, covering how it works, what it can do, how to connect external clients like Claude, and how your data is handled.

For a friendly overview, see Meet the Personal Assistant.

1. Overview

The Personal Assistant is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector that gives an AI assistant (such as Claude) the ability to manage your domain.co.nz account through a conversational interface. The assistant has access to a defined set of tools — each tool is a specific action it can take, such as listing your domains, adding a DNS record, or creating an email mailbox.

You can interact with the assistant in two ways:

Both channels use the same underlying capabilities and the same security model.

2. What the Personal Assistant can do

The assistant has 39 tools across the following categories:

Account

• List the client accounts you have access to
• Look up account services, products, and current invoices

Domains

• Check whether a domain name is available, including pricing for registration, renewal, and transfer
• Register a new domain (with optional WHOIS privacy and ID protection)
• Renew a domain
• Transfer a domain into your account
• List the domains in your account

WHOIS

• View the public WHOIS record for any domain
• View the registrant contact details for your own domains
• Update the registrant contact details on your own domains

DNS

• View all DNS records for a domain
• Add A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, and other record types
• Update existing records
• Delete records
• View and update nameservers
• Delete an entire DNS zone (used to resolve hosting provisioning conflicts)

Hosting

• List your hosting accounts
• Order a new hosting plan
• Retry a stuck hosting order
• Check whether your hosting is ready to receive uploaded files
• List the files in your hosting account
• Upload website files (the assistant can also generate a simple site for you)
• Restore files from a previous backup (uploads create automatic backups before overwriting)

Email

• Create, list, and delete email mailboxes
• Change mailbox passwords
• Get the IMAP/POP3/SMTP server settings for any mailbox (for setting up Outlook, Apple Mail, iPhone, Android, etc.)
• Add and delete email forwarders
• Set, update, and delete out-of-office auto-responders

Billing

• Check whether your account has the means to pay (credit balance and/or registered card)
• Pay an outstanding invoice using account credit and/or your registered card

Support

• Open a support ticket on your behalf when the assistant can't resolve something itself
• Log requests for capabilities the assistant doesn't yet have, so we can prioritise improvements

Prices shown by the assistant are returned both excluding GST and (for NZ-resident clients) including GST, with a clear note when GST does not apply.

3. Connecting Claude

If you'd like to use Claude (the AI app from Anthropic) to manage your domain.co.nz account, you can add domain.co.nz as a connector. You'll need a Claude account on the Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise plan — custom connectors aren't available on the free tier.

Setup

1. Open Claude (web at claude.ai, desktop, or mobile)
2. Go to Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector
3. Enter:
   • MCP server URL: https://mcp.domain.co.nz/mcp
4. Click Connect
5. You'll be redirected to a domain.co.nz login page
6. Sign in with your normal domain.co.nz email and password
7. Authorise Claude to act on your behalf
8. You're done — Claude can now use the Personal Assistant tools in any conversation

Once connected, just start a conversation with Claude and ask it to do something. It will automatically use the Personal Assistant tools when relevant.

Disconnecting

To disconnect, go to Claude Settings → Connectors → domain.co.nz → Remove. This revokes the connection. To re-connect later, go through the setup again.

4. How it works (technical)

You → Claude (or the in-app chat) → MCP server → domain.co.nz API → WHMCS / cPanel / registry

The MCP server runs at https://mcp.domain.co.nz on our infrastructure. It's a stateless service whose job is to authenticate you (via OAuth 2.0) and forward your requests to our internal API.

The internal API is the layer that actually does the work. It checks that any action you ask for is something you're authorised to do — it independently verifies that every domain or email address you reference belongs to your account before doing anything. If you ask for an action on a domain you don't own, it will be refused.  The Personal Assistant cannot access any domains or services that do not belong to you.

Authentication and authorisation

• In-app chat uses your existing client-area login session.
• Claude connector uses OAuth 2.0 with PKCE. The OAuth flow signs you in via WHMCS's ValidateLogin API, which validates your password without ever exposing it to Claude or to our MCP server.
• Every request is authenticated and authorised server-side. The AI assistant cannot impersonate other users or escape the bounds of your account.

Transport and security

• All communication is over HTTPS only. We do not accept plain HTTP.
• The MCP server validates the Origin header on every request to prevent DNS rebinding attacks.
• The Anthropic Claude apps pass user requests over a secured channel using the standard Streamable HTTP MCP transport.
• Tool calls are individual, atomic operations — there is no persistent session state between calls.

5. Privacy and data handling

This section summaries "what does domain.co.nz do with my data when I use the Personal Assistant?". In short, your data is not used for training, we don't store your conversations, we only store your specific modification instructions (eg. "change my nameservers to ..."), support requests (in a generated ticket) and new functionality requests.

For further information see our detailed AI Privacy Policy.

What flows where

When you send a message:

1. Your message goes to Anthropic's Claude API (in the case of the Claude connector) or stays within domain.co.nz infrastructure (in the case of the in-app chat).
2. Claude (or the in-app chat AI) decides which tool, if any, to call.
3. The tool call is sent to our MCP server, which forwards it to our internal API.
4. The result of the tool call goes back through the same path to you.

Claude reads your message and any data the tool returns. Claude does not see your password, your card details, or other clients' data.

What we store on our servers

• Action logs — When the assistant takes an action on your behalf (e.g. "added DNS record X to domain Y", "created mailbox info@example.com"), we may record the action so we can investigate any later issues.
• Support tickets the assistant raises for you — The full text of any ticket the assistant opens on your behalf is stored in our normal support system.
• Capability gap notes — When you ask the assistant to do something it can't yet do, it logs the request so we can prioritise adding the capability. The log includes the description of what you wanted but doesn't include the surrounding conversation.
• Conversation history (in-app chat only) — If you use the in-app chat, your conversation history is stored against your client account so the chat can reference earlier messages in the same session. You can clear it at any time using the "Clear conversation" button. The Claude connector does not use this — Claude manages its own conversation history.

What we do not store

• Your password (it's never seen by the AI assistant)
• The content of your DNS records, mailboxes, or files (we have access to them through normal cPanel/WHMCS administration but the AI's actions don't create extra copies)
• Your conversations with Claude (MCP conversations are in your Claude account, not ours)

Retention

We retain action logs, support tickets, and capability gap notes for the lifetime of your account. When you close your account, this data is deleted along with the rest of your account data, in line with our overall retention policy.

Who can see this data

domain.co.nz staff can only access the action logs and support tickets for support and operational purposes (e.g. investigating an issue you've reported). Capability gap notes are reviewed by our product team to plan improvements.

We don't share this data with third parties except where required by law or as needed to operate the service (e.g. when a domain registry needs some data to process a registration).

6. What if something goes wrong?

The assistant tries to be helpful, but it's not infallible. Some common failure modes and what to do:

The assistant is configured to never speculate about failures — when something goes wrong, it reports the exact error message it received rather than guessing why.

7. Limitations

A few things the assistant deliberately doesn't do:

• Account creation — You need an existing domain.co.nz account to use the assistant. New customers should sign up through our regular registration page.
• Payment method changes — Adding or updating a card on file is done through our normal billing system, not via the assistant.
• Operations on other peoples domains or services — The assistant only sees what's in your own account.
• Anything that violates our Terms and Conditions.

8. Support

• Open a support ticket
• For urgent issues, you can ask the in-chat assistant to raise a high-priority ticket on your behalf