Today I am going to explain what SMTP is, and how to use an SMTP provider such as SendGrid to send emails from your address.

What Is SMTP?

SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is the method through which internet servers send email messages. When you send an email through your Gmail account, for example, your mail client uses SMTP to send that message to the server. The server then also uses SMTP to send it to the receiving server.

Without diving too much into the technical details, the easiest way to think of it is that SMTP is an email server.

What is SendGrid?

SendGrid is an SMTP service provider – in fact, it's the provider freeCodeCamp uses to send out Quincy's weekly newsletter.

Like many SMTP providers, SendGrid offers the use of their mail servers to send your emails. This is an excellent option for sending large volumes of emails, where having to do so manually would take a significant amount of time and effort.

How to Create a SendGrid Account

The first step in using SendGrid's services is to create your account. Head on over to the SendGrid website to get signed up. They offer multiple pricing models, but the free level will be sufficient at least for this tutorial.

As you scale up your email list, however, you may need additional features from a higher subscription tier.

Once you are signed in, you should see a default dashboard view:

Image depicting the default SendGrid dashboard view.

How to Set up Your Domain or Email with SendGrid

From that dashboard view, select "Settings", then choose "Sender Authentication" from the dropdown menu. The Sender Authentication settings are where you tell SendGrid which email accounts to allow emails to be sent from.

There are two approaches here – if you have a custom domain for your emails, you can set up Domain Authentication. If you are using a personal email address, such as a Gmail address, then you will need to set up Single Sender Authentication.

Choose whichever option works best for you, and follow SendGrid's prompts to set it up. Your end result should look similar to this:

Image depicting Sender Authentication settings.

How to Send Emails Via SendGrid's API

The actual process of sending the emails is done through SendGrid's API. But before you can use the API, you'll need to set up an API key.

From your dashboard view, select "Settings", then select "API Keys". Choose "Create API Key" and select the permissions you want the key to have (I gave mine full permissions, just to avoid issues).

Once you have the key, save it somewhere safe as you will not be able to access it again.

Image depicting the API Keys settings page.

Now that you have the API key, you'll need to set up the code to use the /mail/send endpoint. You can write the code manually, or use one of the helper libraries such as SendGrid's Node.js package.

When using the Node.js package, you set the values for your email as follows:

• to: The address to send the email to.
• from: The address to send the email from. This should match your settings in the Sender Authentication.
• subject: The subject of your email.
• text: The content of your email, if you are sending a plain text email.
• html: The content of your email, if you are sending an HTML email.

The properties in a raw API call are different, as are the properties in the other helper libraries. Be sure to refer to the documentation for your specific approach.

How to Use Dynamic Templates in SendGrid

As an alternative option, instead of sending the email content in your API call, you can use a Dynamic Template to generate the content.

A Dynamic Template lets you set the content for emails to send out, and offers Handlebars functionality to replace specific data fields.

To create a Dynamic Template, from your dashboard select "Email API" and then "Dynamic Templates". Then click "Create a Dynamic Template" – you should see your template appear below.

Click on it, then select "Add Version" to open the template selection. Choose the blank template, then select the type of editor you would like to use (I use the code editor).

Image depicting the editor.

You can write the content of your email, and use placeholders such as {{name}} for the dynamic data. These placeholders would be given values through your API calls when you send the emails.

If you want to see how it would render, you can use the "Test Data" tab to add sample data for the placeholders.

How to Get Blocks/Bounces/Spams via SendGrid's API

It's important to track undeliverable emails. SendGrid offers tooling to help track this for you, and that data is available through three different dashboard views (or API endpoints, if you want to parse the data programmatically).

• Blocked emails are emails that were rejected by the receiving email provider's policies, such as university emails that don't accept external traffic, or emails that could not be resolved (the mail server was not found).
• Bounced emails are emails that were received by the server but returned. This occurs in cases where the email server exists, but the specific user does not, or the email inbox is at capacity.
• Spam emails are arguably the most important to monitor, as these are generated when a user receives your email and reports to their provider that your email is spam. These directly impact your reputation as a sender, so it is imperative that you do not send an email to someone who has marked your previous emails as spam.

Other Concerns

Speaking of your reputation as a sender, SendGrid offers a top-level metric called "Sender Reputation". This metric is an aggregation of your activity through their platform, and helps give a general idea of the way email providers are likely to handle your emails.

A lower reputation will result in your emails being marked as spam automatically, or even your IP addresses being blocked.

If you are on the free tier for SendGrid, you will be using shared IP addresses. This means that other customers will also be sending emails through that same IP, and their actions can negatively impact your reputation.

If you intend to send large volumes of emails, I recommend that you purchase dedicated IP addresses to ensure that your reputation is protected.

Conclusion

I hope this article has helped you become more familiar with SendGrid and the services they offer. You should now be ready to start sending your own emails.

If you are planning to start an email newsletter, I wrote an article about creating effective email newsletters that might help.

In this article, I am going to provide some tips and suggestions for maximizing the impact of your email newsletter: open rates, click-through rate, and not irritating your recipients.

I will also share some technical details and configurations you can use to maximize the deliverability of your email newsletter.

How to Write an Impactful Subject Line

Your subject line is the first thing your readers will see when the email appears in their inbox. It's important, then, that you use something eye catching that encourages them to read the message.

What to Include in the Subject Line

Your subject line should provide a brief summary of the email content or highlight the key information. Some examples would be:

Learn Data Structures and Algorithms [free 6-hour coding course]

This headline comes from one of Quincy's email newsletters, and calls out the first article out of a weekly curated list of five articles.

Our Community Reached 3,000 Members - Here's What's Next

Here the headline provides a clear summary of the email's content – an update on the community's success and future plans.

The Observatory #4: Gravity is the key to community growth

Pulled from an Orbit newsletter, this subject line has two benefits: Like the others, it summarizes the content of the email. It also helps readers recognize this email as a serial newsletter, and track the number to ensure they have not missed one.

What to Exclude from the Subject Line

You want to avoid headlines which are vague, uninformative, or may seem like spam.

Click Here! Important Information Within!

Avoid words and phrases such as click here, urgent, important, and priority. These types of subject lines are often used in spam emails, and can cause your readers to disengage.

April 2020 Community Update

While this subject is not going to seem like spam, it is also vague and uninformative. You want your subject to catch the reader's attention and be unique.

Top Picks Just For You

Another vague subject line, this one also gives off a "click-bait" vibe. This type of subject line doesn't hook your readers or entice them in to reading your full email.

How to Craft an Effective Email Body

The body of your email is where your core content will go. Having a well written and effective email body is essential.

HTML vs. Plain Text in Emails

Using HTML in your email can make it look nice, certainly. However, HTML emails are more likely to be flagged as spam by the receiving providers.

Plain text emails are generally safer, though they offer less functionality. Additionally, a plain text email will ensure maximum compatibility with all devices, and ensure that your email can be viewed even over slower internet connections.

HTML, on the other hand, offers a much higher level of customization in terms of layout, content, and functionality. You can even implement things like interaction tracking to see who is opening (open rate), reading, and clicking on links in your email (click-through rate). Whether these features are worth the potential impact to delivery is or not is up to you.

How to Handle Links in Emails

Speaking of links, there are some special considerations when it comes to handling links in your email. The key idea is to keep your links easily readable and verifiable.

One important aspect is the transparency of your links. You want to avoid using things like URL shorteners that hide the domain the link points to. Keeping your link's target clear ensures that your readers can trust the safety of the link.

Many sending providers offer click-tracking features, where they will provide metrics on how many of your readers click the links within your email.

While these metrics may seem useful, they do come at a cost – usually the links are obfuscated through a redirect via the provider's domain. This decreases the chance that your readers will click the link.

Unsubscribe Links

If your email is considered commercial material (marketing, advertisements, and so on.), having an unsubscribe link is required. If it is a transactional (receipt, account updates) or relationship (communicating with existing contacts) email, then an unsubscribe link is not necessarily required but is still strongly recommended.

Having an unsubscribe link allows your recipients to quickly and easily opt-out of receiving future communications. While it may not seem ideal to lose your reader base, it is much better than having your emails flagged as spam (which can impact your sender reputation and cause future emails to anyone with that email provider to be blocked).

Your unsubscribe link does not need to be prominent or featured – a simple link with the text "Unsubscribe" at the bottom of your email is often sufficient.

Content and Layout of Your Emails

The content and layout of your email body are also very important. If you are using plain text to send your email, then your biggest consideration will be the length of your paragraphs. In general, shorter paragraphs are easier to read than a "wall of text", and will help your readers stay engaged with the content.

If you are using HTML, then you have some additional obstacles to consider.

For example, including images may seem very tempting as they can make the email look more visually appealing. But each image increases the time it takes for the email to render on the reader's device, and images aren't as accessible for those who use screen readers as plain text is.

Remember that images should add to the content, not detract from the information.

Another aspect to consider when using HTML is the semantic structure. To avoid any rendering errors or accessibility concerns, you will want to keep your HTML semantically correct. I recommend using an HTML Validator before sending the email to ensure you don't have any errors.

Content length itself is also important. You don't want to overwhelm your readers with too much information in a single email. If you have a lot of content you want to share, consider making a blog post or news article – then, link that article in your email with a brief summary of the content.

How to Sign Off in an Email

The signature of your email is just as important as the main content. Signing off your email lets your readers know who sent it, and gives you the opportunity to close out the content.

You should include your name and your role within your organization, so that your readers see that the email came from a person. This creates the impression that it is a more personal communication and not an automatically generated email.

Finally, the signature and conclusion also give you the chance to thank your readers for their time. It is good to recognize that your readers took time out of their day to read your content. Time is valuable, and your readers have given you theirs.

Technical Aspects of Email Newsletters

Now that you've drafted your first newsletter, you need to address the technical concerns. Namely, you'll need to figure out how you'll send this newsletter.

Choose a Sending Provider

The first question to answer is what will you use to send this email? It is entirely possible to set up and run your own Secure Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server, but that can be a significant investment of time and resources.

Instead, there are a number of providers that will handle sending the emails for you. Here at freeCodeCamp we use SendGrid. Most providers will offer an API to request that emails be sent, or a UI to prepare your emails. Then they will handle the actual send process for you.

While these providers can get expensive at higher volumes, often times the cost is worth the access to additional features such as email validation and bounce report tracking.

Set up Email Authentication

Another important technical aspect is email verification and authentication, especially if you are using a custom domain.

How does a provider such as Gmail confirm that the email has legitimately come from your organization and not someone pretending to be you?

There are a couple of security steps you can take to ensure that your emails are delivered while spoofed emails are not.

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): You can use an SPF setting to validate that the mail server is authorized to send emails from your email domain. SPF is enabled via a TXT record in your domain settings. The content of that record will depend on the system you are using to send those emails.

• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): You can use DKIM to assert that the email message has not been modified in transit from the sending server to the receiving server. DKIM records are set up in your domain settings either as a TXT record or a CNAME record, depending on your provider. These records will indicate the public encryption/decryption keys.

• Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC): The final step, after enabling SPF and DKIM, is to set up a DMARC record. The DMARC record tells email providers what to do if an email from your domain fails SPF or DKIM, where to send delivery reports, and how often to apply the DMARC policy. A DMARC record is added as a TXT record to your domain settings, as _dmarc.yourdomain.tld.

Congratulations. Now that you have read this article, you should have a basic understanding of how to create and send your first email newsletter. I hope you found this article helpful.

I had never built and launched an email newsletter before last week. Below is the story of my experience launching an email newsletter and the key learnings I have found.

My hope is that you can use my learnings to launch your own and possibly avoid some pitfalls along the way.

How to Find the Problem and the Opportunity

Unable to leave my home as a result of local COVID-19 lockdowns, I have had more time to pursue side-projects, learn new skills, and look into developing trends. One trend that is unavoidable for me is the rise in remote work.

Like many of us, I have been part of a forced experiment in working from home for the majority of 2020 and for an unknown portion of 2021.

While there are undeniable benefits of WFH, there are also many challenges that WFH creates. These challenges include:

• Having a proper working environment.
• Managing work-life balance.
• Maintaining professional relationships.
• Addressing burnout.
• Navigating my career.

I realized that millions of others are facing similar challenges in working from home and may need guidance on how to excel at WFH.

The guidance is out there in publications and expert books, but most people don't have the time or drive to find it all.

I saw an opportunity to provide some simple tips and tricks that will help people work from home.

Now the question was how to deliver that information?

How I Decided to Use Email as a Medium

My background is in building websites. A work from home website with educational content was an easy choice, but just not sticky enough for this idea. My websites primarily attract visitors through SEO and I wanted to help people on topics they may not know even exist.

Also, I wanted to explore another medium as an educational endeavor. Time to dive into TikTok? Look into audio media? An email newsletter?

An email newsletter checked all the boxes I wanted. Email newsletters have the benefits of:

• A captive audience.
• Ability to deliver content on a scheduled basis.
• Easy to track metrics.

I have always been a fan of newsletters such as Morning Brew, Tag The Flag, and theSkimm. I find these newsletters inspiring as successful entrepreneurial pursuits but also as wonderful media to communicate to a captive audience.

Email newsletters are a great medium to learn about. Over 83% of businesses already use email newsletters with an average ROI of 4400% ($44 for every dollar spent).

With email, I could set up an automated series that people would only have to take action (sign up) once and I would be able to deliver information to them over one month. I could "set it and forget it" while people consumed the content and received helpful advice for working from home.

Email newsletter it is!

The idea formed into an 8-email series that would be automatically delivered over 1 month. I decided to call it the Work From Home (WFH) Bootcamp.

Early Email Marketing Lessons

Before getting into the details, I had to understand the limits of my new medium.

I know how to speed up a webpage, optimize for SEO, track website visitors, monitor bounce rate, and so on - but I knew nothing about best practices for email, the inherent limits of emails, and what to look out for.

Here are some things I learned.

Email Open Rates

• Average email open rate should be between 15-25%.
• Average click-through rate should be about 2.5%.

What this means is that over an eight-email series, people will only read a couple of the emails. Not ideal. My hope is that based on the nature of the series, people will be expecting the emails, leading to a higher open rate. But low open rates are an inherent factor of email newsletters.

The idea for the Bootcamp was to include informative references in the emails along with some recommendations for products to try. If only 2.5% click through to those in-depth articles and products, the impact of the email to drive actions on other websites would be lower than I expected.

Here are my early results:

Open rate and click rate for the first 1,000 subscribers to WFHBootcamp.com

The first email in the WFH Bootcamp has already been sent to over 1,000 subscribers. Only 26.3% of those subscribers have opened the first email. This is quite a bit lower than I expected and something that I will have to monitor as the Bootcamp grows.

Email Content Optimization

I am familiar with writing website copy and optimizing for SEO. But what makes good email newsletter copy?

Here is what I learned as I prepared to write the email series:

• Length is dependent on the type of email, keep it short for sales.
• Newsletter content should be 90% educational and 10% promotional (HubSpot).
• Subject matters (a lot) - 47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone (OptInMonster).
• Using an emoji in the subject line can increase open rates by 4.2% (Moosend).
• Images are difficult - 43% of people disable images, and some email clients don’t display background images (OptInMonster).

I was trying to distill working from home best practices into 8 concise emails. I decided that my length needed to be under 900 words. This is about 3 minutes of reading time (an eternity in the attention economy).

The average time reading an email is 11 seconds - so writing longer-form content is a gamble. Short attention spans are the limit of the email newsletter medium.

Email Delivery Times

Since I set out to create an automated newsletter about working from home, figuring out when the content arrived in my subscribers' inboxes was important.

GetResponse analyzed about 4 billion emails sent by their customers to gather information on the best time to send to individual email addresses. Here is what they found by day of the week:

Get Response data for email opens and clicks by day of the week.

I decided that receiving WFH content on the weekend did not make much sense. Additionally, the GetResponse data confirmed that weekend emails suffered worse open and click rates. Luckily my email provider had such a feature to only send emails during the weekdays.

There is also a lot of research about the best time to send emails (10am on Tuesday?) but based on this research I decided that the best time to send during the weekday was when someone signed up.

How I Wrote the Content and Generated User Feedback

Writing can be hard, especially as a marketer.

I had been keeping copious notes on WFH best practices over the past year for my own benefit. These notes led me to create an outline, which made it quite easy to start conducting user research and eventually populating that outline with helpful content.

Here is how I got started.

Customer Research

Like all good product development, I started by taking my initial findings to potential customers. I asked people: "what do you want to learn if you subscribe to my newsletter? What are you hoping to get out of it?"

When I first asked people these questions, I got three types of replies:

1. Help me improve the physical comfort of my office space.
2. Help me improve my mental health and well being when working without frequent contact with others.
3. Help me excel as a remote worker and enhance my career prospects.

Fortunately, these categories aligned with what I had hoped to write about. Then, by practicing design thinking (which is a holistic way of applying critical thinking to solving design-related problems that matter to people) I was able to peel back the layers and better understand what users wanted to learn and most importantly, why.

Now was time to write.

A Writing Sprint

I wrote all eight emails over a (long) weekend. This writing sprint was enabled by conducting the extensive industry and user research prior to writing.

Here are the subject lines and lengths of each email:

• WFH Bootcamp #1: Welcome! 👋 Let's Make Your Workspace Work For You 🖥 (806 words)
• WFH Bootcamp #2: Why Your Home Office Matters 🖥 (862 words)
• WFH Bootcamp #3: Winning WFH’s Mental Games 🧘‍♀️ (586 words)
• WFH Bootcamp #4: Let’s Talk About Your Physical Health 🏃‍♀️ (765 words)
• WFH Bootcamp #5: 📊 Boost Your WFH Performance 📈 (545 words)
• WFH Bootcamp #6: 👩‍💻 Managing Your Career👨🏽‍💻 (508 words)
• WFH Bootcamp #7: How Companies Are Thinking About Remote Work 🏬🏢 (350 words)
• WFH Bootcamp #8: WFH and Your Future 🚀🚀🚀 (425 words)

In total that is just under 5,000 words. Double spaced, that is about 20 pages of content.

So basically, the WFH Bootcamp is my research paper for WFH 101.

How I Built the Landing Page

Luckily, creating a simple blog is quite easy.

I built a simple landing page with Wordpress, hosted on Kinsta, used ConvertKit as my email provider, and used images from UnDraw.co.

Standing up the website only took a few hours.

WFHBootcamp.com

For the MVP, the content is exclusively available through the emails. Providing gated content on the website (using a tool like Wordable to quickly add the content from Google Docs to Wordpress) is a logical next step but not a requirement for the MVP of the email series.

For those looking to easily create gated content, services like SubStack offer an out-of-the-box solution to launching newsletters with gated content and paid subscriptions.

How I Launched the Newsletter, and Next Steps

Early Feedback Is Critical

I had been incorporating real world feedback as often as I could. I launched the Bootcamp on an expedited timeline with a beta group of about 100 users (friends, family, connections) as soon as the content was written.

These users provided invaluable early feedback via a customized survey I created via TypeForm.

Was I embarrassed at times? You bet. Did that feeling slow me down? Not at all. As Reid Hoffman says "If There Aren't Any Typos, We Launched Too Late!".

As with building and launching any other type of software product, speed to market is very important.

Not because I fear competitors or imitation, but because I stand by my product and believe that it adds value to real people in real jobs who are struggling to work from home. And the sooner I could get the email series launched the sooner I could help those people.

Builders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Getting feedback is key to building trust.

These early users have expanded the growth of the Bootcamp as well. Since launching with these 100 beta users, over 1,000 people have now signed up for the WFH Bootcamp.

What to Monitor With Email Newsletters

As these numbers continue to grow, I am monitoring:

• Open rate.
• Click rate.
• Forwarding rate/email sharing.
• List growth rate.
• Number of unsubscribes.
• Spam complaints.

Additionally, I will continue to generate customer feedback via surveys.

Conclusion

I hope that my story of how I launched the WFH Bootcamp was helpful.

We covered why email is a great medium, the limitations of email, important considerations when writing content, early testing with users, and what to monitor in your email newsletter.

I will continue to monitor, iterate, and improve the emails - as I would with any software product.

Email has proven to be a fun and easy medium to learn and launch a new product in. It has allowed me to quickly launch a product that hopefully helps people be more productive and happy while working from home and it has been a wonderful learning experience so far.

Setup Requirements:

• Your Domain Name System (DNS) Editor (i.e. GoDaddy Admin that has the email addresses registered)
• 3rd Party e-mail Admin Accounts (e-mail Blast Service [Mailchimp, ConstantContact, etc.], Additional Mail Server you might be using, etc.)

You might be reading this because you want help resolving an error you just received. This error might be stating something about your DMARC records and that the e-mail was not authenticated. And most likely you attempted to e-mail someone with a ‘@gmail.com’ or ‘@yahoo.com’ address or similar free, big e-mail providers which have higher default guidelines than an e-mail server you would set up through your own company.

I was there too and struggled quite some time to get this figured out — not just what you need, but also how to get it done, the right way.

Our Statistics before and after configuring SPF, DMARC & DKIM:

As you will be able to see in the following pictures these implementations show us that:

• Bounce Rate was 70% before implementation, a whole 21441 E-mails that never made it into the subscribers inbox.
• After implementation the Bounce Rate was only 5.6%, down to only 1855 Bouncebacks.
• The bouncebacks are not all just due to security, some e-mails are deleted or the subscriber made a typo (mail.com instead of gmail.com is a typical one).

Constant Contact Bounce Statistics, Before & After configuring SPF, DMARC & DKIM.

Enough talk about how important the implementation is - lets get to it!

In order to be 100% compliant in terms of e-mail authentication, you need 3 things configured:

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework): a framework used to prevent e-mail forgery aka Spoofing. Spoofing is when someone is pretending to be sent from your e-mail address.
• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): This will allow a server to send e-mails in your name while being authenticated to make sure it’s really you. For example, if you use MailChimp or ConstantContact for newsletter blasts and say it’s from ‘john@doecompany.com’, the e-mails will still be sent from MailChimp or ConstantContacts server. However, you verified with your Blast e-mail service that is indeed you and not someone pretending to be you. This is the most important one to set up correctly for businesses, as otherwise there will be a high bounce-back rate!
• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): Also an Anti-Spoofing mechanism that will work in conjunction with SPF. Having one or the other is ineffective — you will need both to be properly protected.

DNS Editor / DNS Zone Editor, GoDaddy Screenshot Examples (Login and navigate to your Admin Dashboard first):

GoDaddy Manage Domains Dashboard Screenshot with Arrow pointing at Manage option. (1)

GoDaddy Domains Dashboard Screenshot with the arrow pointing at Manage Zones option. (1)

Select the Domain you need to add the DNS entries to in the screen after clicking on Manage Zones.

GoDaddy DNS Zone Editor Admin Dashboard Screenshot with Arrow pointing on the Add Option. (1)

On the bottom of your records on the right-hand side, you will see an ‘Add’ button which will lead to the following dialog menu in which you will enter the SPF, DMARC & DKIM entries each individually:

_GoDaddy Add DNS Entry Admin Dashboard Screenshot with button pointing at Save button and TXT as type, dmarc as Host and the required value under TXT Value highlighted. (1)

For other guides for Zone Editors, just go to the knowledge base/support center of your Domain Provider.

Setting up SPF:

The SPF is the easiest to set up. You will need 2 things:

1. Your DNS Editor (i.e. GoDaddy Admin Portal)
2. The IP address of your e-mail server

After accessing your DNS Editor (also called DNS Zone Editor in CPanel), you want to create a new TXT entry. In this TXT Entry, you should have 3 possible fields: Host, TXT Value / Value & TTL (Time-To-Live). What you will enter in these fields is the following (some details might vary, this is based on a GoDaddy installation):Host: @ TXT Value: v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:~allTTL: 1 Hour

GoDaddy DNS Sample TXT Entry for the SPF settings as described above.

Explanation / Meaning of these settings:

‘@’ is the designation within GoDaddy that refers to the Domain you are working in. So if you are working inside ‘doecompany.com’ you could replace ‘@’ with ‘doecompany.com’ and the result would be the same. However, it is best practice to use the ‘@’ symbol instead in the case of GoDaddy.

is the IP of where your e-mails are being sent from. This is not necessarily the same IP that the actual website is hosted on.

+a: Includes A record

+mx: Includes Mail Server record

+ip4: Designates from which IPv4 server

~all: Records outside of the prior declared ones will fail.

TTL = 1 hour (or 3600 seconds): Time-To-Live, or how often this should expire. If you were to change e-mail servers, you would be glad that there is only a maximum gap of 1 hour of not being authenticated.

Setting up DKIM:

This is the most tedious of the three to set up and the most critical one. You will authenticate the 3rd party to send on behalf of your e-mail name, i.e. ‘john@doecompany.com’.

I have 2 DKIMs currently set up:

1. For my actual Mail Server which lives on a different server than my actual website (this is more common in Enterprise environments).
2. For my e-mail newsletter blast service provider (ConstantContact in this case, it could easily be Mailchimp or someone else in your case).

For both scenarios, your legwork is the same. You will have to contact the e-mail support of your Mail Server or Third Party e-mail sending service and have them install the DKIM on their end, for your account.

This is completely out of your hands and typically takes them 1–2 days to complete this task. Basically what is happening is that they will register and install an RSA of at least 1024-Bit encoding (2048 is better) on their server.

After they got it set up, they will send you a Public Key that you will be using in the next step to set up your DKIM record.

Just like with the SPF & DMARC records you will access your DNS Editor (also called DNS Zone Editor in CPanel), and create a new TXT entry. In this TXT Entry, you should have 3 possible fields: Host, TXT Value / Value & TTL (Time-To-Live). What you will enter in these fields is the following (some details might vary, this is based on a GoDaddy installation with the e-mails being hosted on inmotionhosting.com and ConstantContact as Newsletter service). Remember to make 1 separate entry per DKIM record:Host: ._domainkeyTXT Value: v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=TTL: 1 Hour

Make sure not to leave any spaces after the ‘=’ symbols.

GoDaddy DNS Sample TXT Entry for the DKIM settings as described above.

Explanation / Meaning of these settings:

The host can be a name or number and is truly unique to the third party. When an e-mail is being sent on your behalf, that e-mail will have that name or number included in the header. That is the record it will be looking under your domain for.

In layman’s terms and our example, the recipient server would go to ‘doecompany’s DNS records and look if what the 3rd party claims to be true will be there. Only if the public key properly validates with the key on their server, the e-mails will be sent out.

v=DKIM1: Simply specifies the version of DKIM being used to clarify further what to look for.

k=rsa: RSA is the most typical one to use as the Key (k). Your 3rd party might opt-in to use something else. But RSA with a 2048 bit encryption is the most secure option you can have at the moment. 1024 bit is good, too.

p=: Instead of ‘’ you would be provided with either a 1024 bit or 2048 bit string of seemingly random text and numbers or other values suited to whatever encryption the 3rd party decided to utilize.

TTL = 1 hour (or 3600 seconds): Time-To-Live, or how often this should expire. If you were to change e-mail servers, you would be glad that there is only a maximum gap of 1 hour of not being authenticated.

Setting up DMARC:

Reminder: In order for the DMARC to do its job, you MUST setup SPF AND DKIM before. Because DMARC verifies SPF & DKIM settings and whether or not the sender suits these settings and is not a spoofer. If SPF & DKIM are not set up, DMARC won’t work and will result in rejected e-mails.

Just like with the SPF records you will access your DNS Editor (also called DNS Zone Editor in CPanel), and create a new TXT entry. In this TXT Entry, you should have 3 possible fields: Host, TXT Value / Value & TTL (Time-To-Live). What you will enter in these fields is the following (some details might vary, this is based on a GoDaddy installation with the e-mails being hosted on inmotionhosting.com):Host: _dmarcTXT Value: v=DMARC1;p=reject;sp=none;adkim=r;aspf=r;pct=100;fo=0;rf=afrf;ri=86400TTL: 1 Hour

GoDaddy DNS Sample TXT Entry for the DMARC settings as described above.

Explanation / Meaning of these settings:

The Host is declared as ‘_dmarc’ because within GoDaddy it will automatically add ‘.johndoe.com’ as a subdomain. This means when an e-mail is being sent out, the DMARC will always be checked under that selector against your domain. If this is not set up properly as ‘_dmarc’, the e-mail servers won’t be able to find your DMARC entry and will automatically fail your e-mail as they believe there is no entry to begin with.

v=DMARC1: Declares the version of the DMARC to clarify what is being used and make authentication more legitimate.

p=reject: E-mails will be rejected from the recipient e-mail server if they don’t match the DMARC records.

sp=none: Do not check if subdomains and the main domain have aligned settings; this is optional.

adkim=r: Whether to be strict (s) or relaxed (r) with the DKIM identifier settings; relaxed is the default.

aspf=r: Whether to be strict (s) or relaxed (r) with the SPF identifier settings; relaxed is the default.

pct=100: 100 percent of e-mails are going to be affected by the DMARC. Integer values between 1 to 100 only. The smaller set would make sense only for testing; should be 100 for security purposes.

fo=0: A DMARC error report is created if SPF & DKIM fail to be authenticated. 0 is the default value. Others are 1, d and s. 1 is if either one fails, to generate a record. d if the signature failed evaluation. s if SPF evaluation failed.

rf=afrf: The formatting for the message failure reports. afrf is the only supported value at the point of this writing.

ri=86400: How many seconds passed between sending the report to the sender. 86400 is default which is 24 hours or 1 day. Many of the major mailbox providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc. will send more than one report a day.

TTL = 1 hour (or 3600 seconds): Time-To-Live, or how often this should expire. If you were to change e-mail servers, you would be glad that there is only a maximum gap of 1 hour of not being authenticated.

And that is how you properly authenticate your e-mails. I hope this took some of the mystery and complication out for you. You will be on your way of not getting those troublesome kickbacks from your mailer-daemon anymore!

Author:

Andreas Lopez — https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreaslopez/

Editors:

Stevan Pupavac — https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevan-pupavac/

Frederick Alcantara — https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederick-alcantara/

Sources:

1. GoDaddy Screenshots by DMARCanalyzer.com: https://www.dmarcanalyzer.com/dmarc/dmarc-record-setup-guides/dmarc-setup-guide-godaddy/