Email Marketing: Adding a DMARC Policy

Improve your Email Newsletter Deliverability with DMARC

As we’ve already determined in our email deliverability series, it’s vital to manage campaign deliverability to ensure email marketing success. With more emails landing in your subscriber’s inbox and less in the spam box, you are positively changing your campaign results. (Think, more opens = more sales).

Putting aside the email deliverability tips we’ve already discussed, we are going to focus on the technical side of email sending. If you’re a current client of GreenMail, all of the your emails are already set up to use SPF and DomainKey/DKIM signing. Meaning, they are currently being signed with our mail server domains. By setting up a DMARC policy (or system that attaches your domain to emails sent from our server), you should expect to see improvement in your sending reputation and inbox delivery.

For each domain you use (which you can find in step #1), replace each {Your From Domain} with the actual domain name. (Note, do not include the “https://www” in your domain name). Not sure how to proceed from here, or would like our experts to handle this? No problem. Email our experts, today, to order our DMARC setup service.

Part 1 – Set Up Custom DKIM Domain Signing

1. Go into your “Configure Account” page in your email marketing account.
2. In the bottom right panel (DKIM Domains) click “Authenticate Domain”. The app will present a list of from domains that you have been using.
3. When you select one, instructions are presented in that same popup about adding a CNAME DNS record.
4. Once you add the DNS record, you then click the Authenticate button, and the app will confirm that the DNS record is set up correctly and add the domain to the list of authenticated domains.

Part 2 – Add a Basic DKIM Policy Text Record

This will not cause any automatic rejections or quarantines if the DKIM passes or fails (because of the ~), but will let it at least be used in a positive manner if it passes.
_domainkey.{Your From Domain} TXT “o=~”

Note, that you will probably want to add the quotes around the value. Most registrars should understand this. You would want to make sure they haven’t double-double-quoted the value (e.g. “”o=~””) If it causes an error, try without the quotes, and we will verify it.

Note that your particular system for DNS records may require trailing . dot after {Your From Domain}. If not having the dot doesn’t work, try it with the trailing dot.

For example: _domainkey.example_domain.com. TXT “o=~”

Part 3 – Add the DMARC Text Record

1. Add this text record to your dns Note, the underscore at the beginning.

_dmarc.{Your From Domain} TXT “v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@{Your From Domain};”

Note that your particular system for DNS records may require trailing . dot after {Your From Domain}. If not having the dot doesn’t work, try it with the trailing dot.

For example: _dmarc.example_domain.com. TXT “v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@example_domain.com.;”

Part 4 (Optional)- Forward the DMARC Reports (Optional)

1. Create a mail forward for dmarc@{Your From Domain}
2. If you need to change this mailbox name, that’s fine, just be sure to switch the “rua” property in (Part 3) above. If you want to forward it to multiple people, that’s fine too, but we would appreciate getting a copy at the above address so that we can confirm everything is set up and continuing to function properly.

If you have any questions, run into problems, or would like assistance in making these changes, let us know. In addition to helping you through the DMARC process, we can help verify that things are set up correctly after these changes are made.