You may have noticed a tab in the email dashboard that says "Authentication" and wondered what it is and if you should do it. The answer is:
Yes – do it now! Setting up authentication gives you the best email delivery possible so you can reach more people.
How does it help me?
Ultimately, it means more emails in more inboxes, which means you reach more people.
Email Authentication tells the server that is receiving your email that SimplyCast is an authorized sender of your messages. Without it, your recipient's mail server will see that the message is coming from one of our servers, but the sender address is your domain (example: sales@example.com) – this means that your message could arrive in your recipient's spam folder.
Setting up authentication tells the recipient that, even though the message is coming from SimplyCast, example.com recognizes that this is a valid source sending email on its behalf.
How do I implement it?
You need to set up your sender email domain (a sample domain could be example.com) with two authentication mechanisms:
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SPF Records
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DKIM Records
I don't know what SPF and DKIM are, what do I do?
If you don't know what SPF (Sender Protection Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) are, don't panic!
This is a sign that you need to send this information to your friendly neighborhood network or email administrator. In short: let the tech ninja do it. To have the task completed faster, bring him or her coffee and/or snacks.
If you need a short technical explanation, these records are added to your domain name's records (DNS records) that allow this authentication to happen.
How long does it take to set up?
Once the setup is completed, it generally takes about 24-48 hours for your domain to be updated in most cases. Once these updates are completed, you should start to see positive results.
Does it matter what email address I sent from?
Absolutely. If you set up authentication on example.com and choose a sender address that isn't an example.com address, you won't see any benefits. You can set up authentication on multiple domains if you need to.
