What is email authentication?
Email is a simple technology, designed for servers to send and receive messages quickly and efficiently. This simplicity has its drawbacks, one of them is forgery. It's very easy to compose an email which to an average user looks like it comes from a reputable company when it might actually be from a spammer or phisher.
Big email services like Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail aren't too fond of this happening and want to protect their users, so they've introduced new authentication protocols to try and prevent forgeries. This however leaves a problem for third party email delivery services who send mail on your behalf (such as OmCore's messaging module) as it can often mean that legitimate mail is flagged as spam. This is because the email campaigns get sent from our mail relay but they are addressed to look like they are actually coming from you.
There are two main technologies (DKIM and SPF) which both operate in a similar way and rely on the domain name system (DNS), which is used to assign domain names to websites (A records), and mail servers (MX records). By adding a specially formed DNS record you can tell receiving mail servers that we are allowed to send mail on your behalf from our mail relay. This drastically reduces the chance of your email newsletter ending up in a customers spam folder.
Setting up SPF
We currently support the SPF authentication method. This involves adding a TXT record to your DNS setup for the domain you send emails from.
Each DNS control panel is different so it's very hard to give precise instructions on how to set this up, however we've outlined a generic approach below which should work for you.
- Login to your DNS control panel, this is usually on the site where you originally purchased the domain.
- Edit your DNS settings, you should see an option to add a new record.
- Make sure you select TXT as the type.
- If you are asked for a name just use the @ symbol.
- In the value field enter the following: v=spf1 mx ptr include:mailrelay.omcore.net ~all
- Save any changes you have made.
- The changes should take up to 48 hours to propagate over the Internet, after this time you should see increased deliverability.
This guide assumes that you don't have any SPF rules setup already and just sets your MX servers and our mail relay as the only people who can send email for your domain. If you use other services which also send mail on your behalf you might need to adjust the SPF record to take those into account as well.
Setting up DKIM
DKIM is slightly more complicated than SPF, however we already have DKIM support setup for our mail relay which should in turn cover your domain as well. You shouldn't need to make any changes to your DNS to start benefiting from this authentication technique.