Learn About Email Deliverability (DNS Settings)
You’ve worked hard to create an impactful email campaign, but before your message can land in a subscriber’s inbox, providers like Gmail and Outlook need proof that the email really comes from you. That proof comes from special DNS settings (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) that show your sending domain is verified and trustworthy. MonkeyPod also checks these settings to confirm your domain before allowing you to send email campaigns.
To make setup easier, MonkeyPod’s Deliverability Tools provide the exact values you’ll need to add to your domain registrar’s DNS settings. DNS settings are managed outside of MonkeyPod and require some technical know-how to access and update. If you don’t normally handle DNS management, simply share these details with the person or team who manages your domain, and it should be simple and straightforward for them to set it up for you.
Which DNS settings need to be configured?
MonkeyPod's Deliverability Tools assist you in configuring the key DNS settings needed to verify your domain. These include:
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): An email authentication method that permits the organization that owns a domain to claim some responsibility for a message by associating the domain with the message. It helps verify that the email is truly from the person or domain it says it's from and hasn’t been opened or altered along the way.
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF): An email authentication protocol that helps prevent spam, spoofing, and phishing attacks by ensuring that emails are sent from trusted servers
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC): An email authentication protocol that helps email domain owners protect their domain from unauthorized use (i.e. "email spoofing") by ensuring that there is domain alignment with SPF and/or DKIM.
How do I find the values needed for those DNS settings?
Before you proceed, make sure that you know how to update your organization's DNS records and that you have access to the tools you need to do so. If you need to get someone's help for that, make sure they're available while you work on this.
To get started, choose Deliverability Tools from the Email Outreach menu.
Some basic background of the various settings is provided there.
Click Proceed to Setup to move on to the setup instructions page and enter your sending domain in the field provided there. Your sending domain is the domain name from which you'll send email through MonkeyPod. Enter only the domain itself—for example, if you plan to send from newsletter@goodwork.org, your sending domain would be goodwork.org.
Select Save to continue.
Important: This process depends on you owning and controlling your sending domain. So, for example, gmail.com or yahoo.com would not be valid sending domains.
MonkeyPod then displays details about the DNS entries you'll need to modify wherever your domain is managed. Click the copy icon next to each of the subdomain and value entries to copy them over to your DNS settings. Be sure to create the correct corresponding type of entry (MX, TXT or CNAME). The specific steps for how to make these changes will vary widely, depending on which domain registrar your organization uses.
After updating your DNS records, a green checkmark should appear in front of each setting that has been correctly configured. Select the Recheck DNS button in the top right to refresh the list as needed.
When your list looks like this (with green checkmarks before each setting), your sending domain has been fully verified, and you're good to go!
Note: It can take a few minutes for DNS changes to be reflected here. Results may be inconsistent while changes are taking effect.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can't MonkeyPod just do this for me?
The Deliverability Tools offered in MonkeyPod are there to help you on the path to setting up your authentication records. MonkeyPod gets you the information you need to make changes to your organization's DNS records, and points you in the right direction, but you'll need someone who knows how your domain is setup to finish the work. Those changes, and the step-by-step instructions to make them, are outside the reach of what MonkeyPod can control.
I'm not familiar with DNS records at all. How do I know if this still needs to be set up?
Just take a look at the Email Outreach menu in MonkeyPod, and there will be an alert icon next to Deliverability Tools if the setup is incomplete.
Similarly, you will see alerts when viewing your MonkeyPod Email List settings, email campaign Delivery settings, and Email Automation settings.
Can I delete the domain I entered and start over?
Sure! On the Setup tab, select Start over with a different domain (at the bottom of the page) to clear out the settings and begin again. (Remember, this won't change your actually DNS records—it just updates the values that MonkeyPod provides for you, based on the new sending domain you enter.)
How can I monitor my bounce rate or open rate for my email campaigns.
Once an email campaign has been sent, go to Email Outreach > View & Create Campaigns and click the name of the campaign. You'll see all of the performance data for your campaign there. To learn more, check out this article about setting up and sending email campaigns.
I'm using Squarespace to manage my DNS settings. Where do I make these changes?
If you're managing your DNS settings with Squarespace, you can access your DNS settings from your domain settings. On Squarespace's DNS settings page, under custom records, select Add Record. Under type, select "CNAME" (or the appropriate record type).
In the Host field, paste everything from subdomain column in MonkeyPod before your domain name. For example, if in the subdomain field, MonkeyPod provides "b6rzbbqf4b6bw7uxw2xot4som26vdtcb._domainkey.example.org," you would paste "b6rzbbqf4b6bw7uxw2xot4som26vdtcb._domainkey" into the Host field in Squarespace.
In the alias data field, paste in everything provided in the Value column in MonkeyPod.
When you're done, select Save. It will take some time for your DNS settings to refresh, but after some time has passed, you can return to the DNS settings page in MonkeyPod to check to make sure your the records were correctly added.