Setting Up Custom Sending Domains

What is a Custom Sending Domain?

 

Custom Sending Domains authenticate your email sending with your own domain so emails are no longer sent as “via Drip.com” in the byline. This allows your emails to be better tracked for reputation and deliverability purposes, and will help you have more control over how your emails are received.

By setting up a Custom Sending Domain, you are giving Drip permission to send on your behalf via a set of DNS records that you will need to place on your Websites DNS settings. These records do not give us any additional access to your domain, but allows inboxes to check your records that Drip does indeed have permission to send emails for you. 

Additionally, these records will not require any updates and will last as long as you send with Drip, so long as they aren’t changed or deleted. Lastly, you are welcome to revoke and delete your Custom Sending Domain at any time, though we recommend verifying with the Deliverability team, which can be reached via support@drip.com, before doing so.

 

Why should you set one up?

 

There are several beneficial reasons for setting a Custom Sending Domain, but the primary one is if you are having inbox or spam placement issues. When it comes to reputation recovery, setting up a CSD is one of the very first steps we recommend as it will enable you to begin measuring your email reputation, and then to take steps to fix it. Even if you aren’t facing reputation issues, setting one up is a great preventative measure that can help develop your sending reputation and help avoid the spam folder! 

In addition to this, there are some more stringent and secure networks, such as businesses and certain internet providers, that may not allow unauthenticated mailing to prevent spam from reaching their users. As more and more places adopt these standards, it is helpful to be ahead of the game even if your emails are landing fine right now.

 

DMARC Requires A Custom Sending Domain

 

DMARC is a fantastic security measure for protecting your domain from being spoofed, but when DMARC is involved, you must absolutely setup a Custom Sending Domain. Any emails sent with Drip will automatically fail your DMARC policy check, resulting in your emails ending up in spam or being flat out rejected from reaching the recipients.

If you are unsure what DMARC is or if you have it setup, check out our article about DMARC here.

 

How to Set Up Your Custom Sending Domain

Sending emails through a custom domain gives you a better chance of reaching the inbox.

To change your sending domain:

1. Go to Settings > Email Setup
2. Click Sending Domain
3. Click Change Sending Domain
4. Choose the custom domain you’d like to use for sending emails
5. Click Next
6. Verify your domain by installing the CNAME records given by Drip to your domain's DNS settings
   • There are times when the DNS settings require a trialing period ".". If your records are not verifying, try adding a period at the end of the host/name ("drip." instead of just "drip") or append your domain to the end of the name.
7. Click I’ve added these records
8. Drip then checks for the CNAME records

Helpful documentation for the most commonly used DNS providers:

• Amazon Web Services
• Bluehost
• Cloudflare
• You will need to “gray-cloud” the subdomains we provide to you during setup since they will not be handling web traffic.
• DreamHost
• GoDaddy
• Google Domain
• HostGator
• Namecheap

CNAME records may take up to 24 - 48 hours to register with your DNS provider.

Appending your domain name to the Host/Name record

When configuring your CNAMEs, some domain providers require that the domain name be added at the end of the host/name record. For the domain of "yoursite.com" add the domain after the first part of the records for all three records as follows:

1. Instead of drip enter "drip.yoursite.com"
2. Instead of s1._domainkey enter "s1._domainkey.yoursite.com"
3. Instead of s2._domainkey enter "s2._domainkey.yoursite.com"

Unsupported Domain Registrars

There are existing CNAME records in your DNS settings

As Drip uses both "s1." and "s2."  as selector prefixes, this will conflict with any other records in the DNS settings using the same prefix. If there are existing s1._domainkey and s2._domainkey CNAME records within your DNS settings, we will need to edit Drip's auto-generated records to resolve the conflict.

For these cases, contact our support team to request Custom CNAME records for your account as a workaround.

Alternatives to CNAME records

Some domain registrars may not support the use of underscores for CNAME configuration or allow for modifications for built-in CNAME records (Such as SendGrid).

For these cases, contact our support team to request MX/TXT records for your account as a workaround.

 

Once we've confirmed the new records have been generated in your account, complete the setup of your custom domain as follows:

1. The first record will need to be added as an MX record type within the DNS settings
   • Our team recommends that you set the MX priority level as 0 or 1. Setting the priority to 0 will be the highest priority, but only matters if there are conflicting records. With how Drip sets the records, it is not expected that priorities should have any conflicts with your existing records. Setting the priority to 0 or 1 shouldn't make a noticeable difference.
2. As shown in the image above, the next two records will need to be added to your DNS records as TXT record types.

What to do once you have this setup and verified

Now that your Custom Sending Domain is set, make sure your campaigns are using a "from" email address that matches the verified Domain to meet Drip's minimum sending requirements, ensuring healthy Deliverability results.

Once you have this setup, the next step would be to test your sending by creating or duplicating an email and emailing it to yourself as the only recipient. After that, you should notice your “from” address in the email header now looks like this:

If you see an additional tag of “via dripemail2.com” then there may be an issue with your setup that needs attention and we recommend reaching out to our support team via support@drip.com to help troubleshoot.

 

This would look something like the screenshot below:

What do you do if you have multiple accounts that use the same domain?

 

Normally, you cannot set up multiple accounts to send with the same verified domain, as you cannot add the CNAME records to your site multiple times, but if you have multiple accounts that utilize the same from email (such as the same brand but in multiple countries/languages) we can assist with this. Please reach out to our support team via support@drip.com and let us know which accounts you need to link and we can set this up on the back end.