Setting up a Sending Domain

In this article, let us see how to set up your store domain for sending emails.

Sending emails from your store domain signature helps to increase email deliverability, and when your store domain is set up, the emails that are sent to customers will appear as if they are coming from your store domain signature, rather than from the Retainful domain.

Watch a step by step video tutorial for setting your email sending domain

Setting up an email sending domain in Retainful

What is a Sending Domain?

When sending emails, domains are a crucial part of how people recognize and experience your brand. For example, if your company is acme.com, you would be wise to include the domain name ‘acme.com’ in the domain name that you send your emails from instead of a shared domain.

If you have not configured the Sending Domain at your Retainful dashboard -> Settings -> Email -> Sending Domain, all the emails which are being sent from Retainful, will appear as they are signed/sent from Retainful’s shared domain.

Sending Emails From Retainful's Domain

Setting up your email domain in Retainful ensures that all emails are delivered from your domain, which removes the "via retainful.net" from the emails and uses "yourdomain.com" on the email properties.

And, your sender email address (from email address) will match the domain you’re sending from. This means that your emails will no longer appear to be sent by a shared domain.

Sending Email From Your Own Domain

NOTE: You can configure the ‘From Name’, ‘From Email Address’, ‘Reply To Address’ at your Retainful dashboard -> Settings -> Email -> Email Properties.

Why should you use your domain to send emails?

Customers expect your business to have a domain name and a website.

Free email services, such as Gmail and Yahoo, are great for personal use, but when you use a free email account for business purposes, people will start to doubt your professionalism and credibility.

Sending emails from your own domain also has the added benefit of preventing your store's emails from being marked as spam by an email authentication measure called *DMARC *(Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance).

Setting up your Email Sending Domain

In this section of the article, we will see how to set up your email sending domain in Retainful.

Prerequisites

Make sure that you are using Retainful’s Growth or a higher plan

You can able to access the ‘Sending Domain’ feature in the 14-day free trial as well.

Checklist

1. Generating DNS records

2. Adding the DNS records to the Domain host

3. Verifying the DNS records

Generating DNS records

1. Login to your Retainful dashboard

2. Go to Settings -> Email -> Sending Domain

3. Enter your ‘Subdomain Name’ and click on ‘Add Domain’

We allow adding "subdomains" as sending domains. Since many store owners configure a number of SPF records for the main domain, it causes confusion and misconfiguration. So, we changed the "Sending domain" to use the subdomain... You can enter something like "send" as the subdomain and add the DNS records.

Enter the subdomain name

4. Once you click on Add Domain, a success message appears with the DNS records like this,

DNS Records

5. You can find three DNS records in the list, the first two are ‘TXT’ type, and the last one is in ‘CNAME’ type. These records have to be added to the hosting account's DNS records page.

Adding the DNS records to the Domain host You can follow the below instructions to add/edit the DNS records to the domain host.

NOTE: Below is general instructions for adding/editing DNS records that will work for most domain hosts. We would be coming up with more detailed documentation on how to add those records on specific hosts.

I) Login to your hosting provider account; For instance,

• GoDaddy

• Hostgator

• AWS

• Google Domains

• Bluehost

• Hostinger

II) Go to your domain's DNS records page, often called ‘DNS Management’, ‘Name Server Management’

III) Select the option to add a new record.

IV) Adding the ‘TXT’ type records,

1. Select record type ‘TXT’

2. In the Host/Alias/Name field, paste the Host/Name entry copied from the Retainful settings page. The name entry to be copied is indicated in the below screenshot:

Copy the host name

3. In the Value/Answer/Destination field, paste the Value/Alias To copied from Retainful settings page. The value to be copied is indicated in red in the below screenshot:

Copy the value

4. Save the record.

5. You can add the second TXT record, by repeating the same process (Step 1 to Step 4)

V) Adding the CNAME record, 1. Select the option to add a new record

2. Select record type ‘CNAME’

3. In the Host/Alias/Name field, paste the Host/Name entry copied from the Retainful settings page. The name entry to be copied is indicated in the below screenshot:

Copy host name

4. In the Value/Answer/Destination field, paste the Value/Alias To copied from Retainful settings page and save the record. The value to be copied is indicated in red in the below screenshot:

Copy the value

5. Save the record

That’s it. You have added the DNS records to your domain host.

Verifying the DNS records

After adding the DNS records to your domain host, you need to verify if the records are added properly.

To verify the DNS records, visit your Retainful dashboard -> Settings -> Email -> Sending Domain and click on the ‘Verify Domain’ button.

Verify the domain

Note: DNS can take up to 48 hours max to update. You might want to wait some time before clicking on the ‘Verify Domain’ button on the Retainful dashboard -> Settings -> Email -> Sending Domain.

Domain Verified

Once the DNS records are verified, the emails will go with your domain signature (DKIM) and will appear to come from your brand.

Known Issues

The following are some of the known issues when adding DNS records

1. Host Names handling differs for some DNS providers

Some hosting service providers like GoDaddy will ask you to enter only Names without the "Root domain"

For instance, when you try to add the following TXT record:

Name	Type	Value
send.example.com	TXT	v=spf1 include:spf.retainful.net ~all

The Name value contains two parts:

1. send = this is the subdomain

2. example.com = this is the root domain

GoDaddy will automatically show the root domain. In the above table, "example.com" is the root domain. "send" is the subdomain.

In GoDaddy, you should only enter the "Subdomain" value alone. Like this:

Name	Type	Value
send	TXT	v=spf1 include:spf.retainful.net ~all

DO NOT enter the root domain if it already appended by your DNS Provider. If you do, then the "Name" value will become like: send.example.com.example.com

The above will fail the verification.

So just enter the "Subdomain" value.

2. SPF record already exists / Duplicate SPF records

Sometimes, you might already have a TXT record for the SPF policy for your sending domain. This rarely happens, especially when you try to use a subdomain that already exists.

So when you add the second record, the verification will fail.

For example, there will be 2 TXT records that begins with "v=spf1" for the same "Host Name / Name".

Here is an example:

Duplicate SPF Records

NOTE: Do not confuse the SPF record for the parent / root domain. Check the "Name" value.

The presence of duplicate records will fail the domain verification. Here is a solution to sort this out:

1. Login to your hosting provider account

2. Go to DNS settings

3. Delete this record: v=spf1 include:spf.retainful.net ~all

4. Then edit the existing record. For example: v=spf1 include:_spf.yourdomain.com ~all

5. Append the value of Retainful's TXT record. So it looks like : v=spf1 include:spf.retainful.net include:_spf.yourdomain.com ~all

6. Save

This should help you verify your DNS successfully.

NOTE: Any DNS change usually takes at least 24 to 48 hours to propagate. So, you might need to wait for some time before clicking on the ‘Verify Domain’ button to verify the DNS records.