Email Verification Manager (DKIM and SPF)

If you are looking for a guide on how to edit the Cpanel of your DNS server with DKIM and SPF records, navigate here.

When sending an email we let you set your own "from address" so that email will appear to be from that address. Instead of coming from publisher@acmepublishing.com, it might come from name@inbox25server.com. Because of the way email was originally built, it's tough to prove if an email is actually coming from the person who claims to be sending it. Email authentication fixes this by letting you add some simple information to your domain name's DNS records that says who's allowed to send email on your behalf.

Without getting into too much of the boring, technical details, there are two main authentication standards you should support called Sender ID and DomainKeys/DKIM. What is important is that different ISP's use one or a combination of both so to get the best results we've made it as easy as possible to support both standards.

It only takes a few minutes to set up and it's something we recommend doing for every "from email address" domain you use.

Please note: To authenticate a domain, you do need to have access to the DNS control panel for the domain. So you can't authenticate (for example) an @gmail or @yahoo address. It is intended for use on your own domain or your client's domains.

How can it help me?

All the large ISP's like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail are using email authentication as an important layer in their spam fighting arsenal. By setting up this system as an authenticated sender, you can instantly bypass certain filters, giving your campaigns a better chance of arriving in the destination inbox. Not only that, but many ISP's like Yahoo! and Hotmail will flag your email as authenticated, which helps to build trust between you and your subscribers and improves the chances of your emails being opened.

Authenticating your domain

Email authentication only takes a few minutes to set up and we've made it a very easy process. The only tricky part is that you'll need access to the DNS records for each domain you want to authenticate.

To get started, click your avatar at the top right in the navigation panel, then select "Email" and "Deliverability".

Enter the "From address" you want to use to send email campaigns from. Let's say for this example that it's inbox25.com.

After you enter your desired sending address (from address), click "Add Address". LeadFWD will then head over to your domains DNS records to verify that valid MX records exist for your domain. If they do, the address will be verified and available to send campaigns from immediately.

The important thing to notice is that there are two main authentication records - DKIM and SPF. We recommend adding them both to make sure you're covered at all of the major ISP's.

At this stage, you're technically ready to send campaigns, but we recommend that you continue with authenticating your sending domain. To continue, click on either 'Authenticate' or 'Generate Key' under the method column (Sender ID/SPF or DKIM).

First, scroll down and click the "Generate Encrypted Key" button. This will start the process of generating the private key that you will need to add to your DNS zone. It can take up to 24 hours for our system to generate and post your string key.

After your private key is generated (approximately 24 hours), you can return to this view and copy the TXT private key and proceed to add a TXT record to your DNS zone. The private key will appear in the empty text area above, once it's generated by our platform.

If all this DNS talk is starting to sound intimidating, don't worry. Most domain name hosts let you add new records to your DNS, so you can always ask them to give you a hand with this step.

Once you've added your DNS records, click the "Authenticate" button. This will complete the process.