Low open rates or going to spam?

An SPF record defines which IP addresses are allowed to send email from your domain. Answer the questions to generate an SPF record.

Email providers use DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to detect forged sender addresses in email (email spoofing), a technique often used in phishing and email spam. Emails that fail authentication are more likely to arrive in the spam or junkmail folder. Follow instructions below to obtain your DKIM Key and add a DKIM record to your DNS records.

Obtain your DKIM Key

Your DKIM Key can be obtained through your hosting control panel. Locating it depends on the type of control panel used by your hosting provider. Select the control panel type below for instructions.

Create your DKIM record

Similar to SPF records, DKIM records are created by adding a TXT record to your DNS records. Since you now have experience adding a TXT record you should already know what to do. Below is an example DKIM record to guide you.

Setup DKIM for Email Service Providers

If you send email through an email marketing platform or email delivery provider; you need to setup DKIM records for them as well.

Select platform or provider Active Campaign Amazon SES AuthSMTP AWeber Benchmark ConstantContact ConvertKit Elastic Email Fastmail GetResponse Google Workspace (Gmail) Infusionsoft iContact MailChimp Mailerlite Mailjet MailGun Mailfence MailRoute Mailkit Mandrill Moosend Marketo Mimecast Office 365 (Outlook) Postmark SendGrid Shopify Sendinblue Salesforce Zendesk Zoho Mail Zoho Campaigns Don't see your platform or provider in the dropdown? Send us a message so we can add it to the list.

Once your DKIM records are setup, use our DKIM checker tool to verify if a DKIM record is present for your domain, or if CNAME records are present to authenticate sending email from your marketing platform or delivery provider.

DMARC records allow senders to indicate their emails are protected by SPF and/or DKIM, and give instruction if neither of those authentication methods passes. Please be sure you have SPF and DKIM records setup before using DMARC. Becoming DMARC compliant involves more than just adding a TXT record to your DNS records. It's a process that can take several weeks to months, depending on your sending volume, email marketing platform or email delivery provider who send email on your behalf.

DMARC compliance will prevent malicious actors from abusing your domain reputation which can in turn impact your deliverability. This is what a typical DMARC compliance process looks like:

1. Add a DMARC record to your domain host records with a policy of p=none
2. Collect data from DMARC reports using a monitoring service for several weeks or months depending on your organization
3. Perform an audit and adjust your SPF & DKIM records if neccessary to bring your domain into alignment
4. Collect more data from DMARC reports for several weeks or months depending on your organization
5. Perform an audit, adjust your SPF & DKIM records if neccessary and enforce a stricter DMARC policy of p=quarantine
6. Continue collecting data from DMARC reports for several weeks or months depending on your organization
7. Perform a final audit, adjust your SPF & DKIM records if neccessary and enforce the strictest DMARC policy of p=reject
8. Continue collecting DMARC reports and monitoring your sending habits

The goal of becoming DMARC complaint is to eventually enforce a policy of p=reject. Setting a reject policy will ensure that all malicious email is stopped. The recipient of the intended malicious email will never become aware of the email in the first place, as it will never get sent to a spam or quarantine folder. Since it's completely blocked, emails are never delivered and end-users cannot be tricked into clicking on a malicious link or opening a dangerous attachment.

The downside is if legitimate emails are failing authentication and emails get rejected, the receiver will never know they are not receiving the intended email. For organizations not actively using a reporting system to monitor authentication, it could take months to discover that legitimate email is not being delivered, potentially hurting marketing programs or other opportunities to engage with prospects, customers and partners. This is why it's important to take DMARC compliance step-by-step, use a monitoring service and incrementally enforce a stricter DMARC policy.

Choose a DMARC monitoring service

Before creating your DMARC record start by choosing a monitoring service to process reports and monitor DMARC compliance.

Create your DMARC record

Answer the questions below to generate a DMARC record for your domain.

Add your DMARC record

Similar to SPF and DKIM, DMARC records are created by adding a TXT record to your DNS records. Since you now have experience adding a TXT record you should already know what to do. Below is an example DMARC record to guide you.

MX records tell email systems where to send messages. Without proper MX records, emails can get lost or bounce back, similar to sending a letter without the right address. Not having an MX record can also lead mailbox providers to think the sender isn't following email rules, leading to delivery problems or being labeled as spam. Select a mailbox provider from the dropdown for instructions to set up MX records.

Select your mailbox provider Google Gmail/Workspace Microsoft Outlook/Office 365 Zoho Mail AWS WorkMail

Email Marketing Platforms help their users send emails to their subscribers or sales prospects, and Email Delivery Providers help their users send transactional emails to their customers. Email Marketing Platforms can be subcategorized into Inbound and Outbound. It's important to use the correct tool as they cannot all be used for the same type of email, and could result in being banned if you misuse their services.

If you're sending marketing emails choose a platform with ability to send in batches. Depending on the number of contacts you have in your list, slowly drip out the emails over a duration of hours or days instead of sending them all at once.

The reputation of the IP address, domain, and email address all play a role in getting emails into your customer's inbox rather than the spam folder. Or, in the case of Google, in the Promotions tab. Email providers know customers want and expect transactional emails, but it's not always easy for them to tell what's transactional and what's better classified as marketing emails.

Using a separate email address, subdomain and IP address for each type of mail makes it much more likely that your important emails will get to your customers, and will prevent normal correspondance or transactional emails from being negatively impacted by marketing email campaigns that accidentally lead to a negative domain or IP reputation.

How do you know when a recipient has marked your email as spam? What can you do about it? If you set up feedback loops, email providers will notify you when a recipient has marked one of your emails as spam. You'll need to set up separate feedback loops for all the email providers you send to. Below are links to signup to feedback loops for the most popular email providers.

Custom tracking domains are important if you use an email marketing platform to send emails. Instead of using your email marketing platform's domain to track actions (opens, link clicks & unsubscribers), custom tracking domains use your domain to track actions and isolate your reputation from other users who use the same provider.

For example, if a spammer uses MailChimp, and the spammer's emails contain the default MailChimp tracking domain, and this causes the default tracking domain to be listed by a domain-based spam blacklist, and if your emails contain the same tracking domain, the deliverability of your emails could be affected.

Creating a custom tracking domain involves adding a CNAME record to your DNS records. Most email marketing platforms will give you the ability to create a custom tracking domain and will provide step-by-step instructions.

Having these two role email accounts is good practice and a requirement by some email providers. They are used to receive abuse complaints so you should check them regularly and resolve all issues as soon as possible.

Check your domain and IP address against known spam blacklists to see if you've been blacklisted. If you are; request to be delisted. If you're using an email delivery provider be sure to check the outbound sending IP addresses assigned to your account.

Talos Reputation Center generates a reputation score grouped into Good, Neutral and Poor. You should aim for an Email Reputation score of Neutral or Good.

Barracuda Central maintains a history of IP addresses for both known spammers as well as senders with good email practices.

Sender Score is a free email reputation evaluation service from Validity. It provides an indication of the trustworthiness of an email sender's IP address.

Gradually increase the send rate to warm up the sending IP addresses tied to your domain with the objective of building good IP & domain reputation with email providers. Start with low volume and increase the sending rate gradually over time. Here's a few common scenarious.

Sending emails to address that bounce will harm your sender score and reputation with email providers, which is why it's important to verify your contact's email addresses. If you acquired contacts through a double opt-in method you don't need to validate as they have already been verified through the double opt-in confirmation process (double opt-in is when a user has to confirm their email address after filling out a form or subscribing to your newsletter). An email validation service will filter out fake, disposable, catch-all and spam trap email addresses. You can do a quick Google search for email list validation to find companies offering this service. Some email marketing platforms will do this for you automatically when you import your list, or offer this service for an additional fee.

Don't send marketing emails to role or general email addresses, instead send to personal or business email addresses of individuals.

Spam traps are email addresses used by email providers and blocklist operators to identify senders who aren't following email best practices. There are two types of spam traps:

The impact of spam traps varies depending on the type. Hitting a pristine spam trap is more severe than hitting a recycled trap. If you've emailed a pristine spam trap, your domain or sending IP address could be immediately blocklisted. If you send email to recycled spam traps regularly, you could start to see your emails being routed to the junk folder. To avoid spam traps, regularly clean up your contact lists.

The majority of email providers don't support every type of HTML content you see on the web. Web browsers are able to display scripts, animations, and complex navigation menus, while your typical email inbox isn't built to handle this type of content. If you're sending outbound email marketing campaigns (cold emails) we recommend creating very simple email content with links only. If you're sending inbound marketing campaigns (newsletters) you can get a little more creative, but don't use complex HTML.

When including links to images or sites in your email body, only use secure HTTPS links. If you link to images or sites without secure links, emails could be considered insecure by email providers and blocked or sent to the junkmail folder.

Signatures featuring your logo and links to social media is fine for regular correspondance but not for transactional email or marketing email campaigns. Keep it simple with a few lines inluding your name, position title, company and link to your website. You want to keep the number of links in your email body to a minimum. In order to comply with anti-spam laws, you'll also need to include a opt-out or unsubscribe link beneath your signature or at the bottom of your emails, as well as your physical or mailing address.

Never use spammy words in any portion of your emails. Below is a list of words in either your subject line or body that will trigger spam filters. If any of your emails require the usage of any of these terms (like when running a promotion), try to use synonyms. Spam filters have become much more sophisticated in recent years and using one or two phrases won’t hurt you so long as you use email marketing best practices and use spam trigger words within context.

This is a common practice by spammers and is sure to trigger spam filters and land your emails in the junkmail folder. Write simple, easy to read subject lines in lowercase letters.

While it's good for deliverability reasons to use a "From" address that invites recipients to contact you, you may want responses to go to a different address. If you have a large subscriber list you could end up receiving tens of thousands of out-of-office emails that you'd prefer to go somewhere other than your main email address. Most email marketing platforms will give you the ability to set a different email address for replies when sending a campaign.

Using alt tags for images included in your emails is important for accessbility, user experience and getting your emails past the spam filter. They provide a textual alternative to your images, and a useful fallback for people who are blind, visually impaired or when your images cannot be displayed. Here's an example alt tag being used in an image.

<img src="flowers-for-mothers-day.jpg" alt="Flowers for Mothers Day" />