Setting Up Email Sending Domains (DKIM)

What is Domain Authentication

Domain authentication, sometimes known as whitelabel, shows Internet Service Providers that the email sending service we use has permission to send emails the behalf of your domain. Drift offers this service so that instead of it looking like emails are coming from Drift, your end users can now see that emails are coming directly from you! Here's a good resource if you'd like to learn more about Whitelabel. 

How to Set up Email Sending Domains

In order to make sure that your chat transcripts and various emails don't get marked as spam or junk when you send it to yourself or others, you will need to make sure that you are authenticating it with DKIM. DKIM authentication is a sender identification tool that protects email senders and their recipients from spam, forgery, and phishing.

To begin doing that, navigate into your Settings > App Settings > Conversations > Email Sending Domains. 

1. Click on Add Domain. 

As of July 23rd, 2019 new sending domains will only require TXT records. 

2. Enter an example email address from the whitelabel domain that you want to add.

Then a "Successfully created sending domain" after you hit Save. But you're not quite done! Above where you added the domain, you should now see that your domain needs verification:

 

3. Click the Needs Verification > . This will then give you a list of DNS entries that you will need in order to set up authentication. 

Use this information to change account settings with your DNS provider. It will look something like the following: 

If you don't know who your DNS provider is, reach out to your hosting service. Otherwise, we would recommend that you send the above information along to your company's IT department to have them set this up.

4. When your domains are validated by your provider, return to Drift and click"Verify."

Now, your domain should read as being Verified, and the CNAME records should have a Valid status:

All done!  You're ready to start sending emails!  Try sending an outbound sales sequence with your new domain :-)  

Troubleshooting Tips

Some common mistakes include:

1. Using Outlook? Outlook emails can be put into quarantine if they don't meet approval for security. In order to prevent or fix this make sure to check your whitelist. Check out this doc for more information on how to prevent this. 

2. Switching the host name and value (Required Data) fields. The Host, sometimes called "Name", is the drift-mail.[yourdomain].com field and the other data fields in the column below it.

3. Not realizing that your DNS provider auto-appends your domain name. To check if this might be the case, you can type the nslookup command in a terminal and validate the response to make sure the domain was set up correctly. In the command-line, this would look like:

nslookup -q=TXT dftsp._domainkey.[yourdomain]

Here's an example of what that command would run and return if we can successfully verify you in Terminal:

Versus how it looks if your account settings are not properly set up with your DNS provider: 

If this second situation occurs, please consult with your IT, because this means that the CNAME authentication information you provided for the three Hosts is incorrect. 

4. When entering DKIM records into GoDaddy, do not append the domain to the host name as we suggest in our app. Please leave out the underlined section of the hostname then retry verification

5. For DNS Made Easy, they automatically append the domain to both the name and alias for CNAMEs. We do not accept in this format. As a workaround, place a period (".") at the end of the alias and the appended domain will disappear!