Adding SPF and DKIM Records and Verifying Ownership of Your Sending Domain Through your Domains DNS Settings or Cpanel.

In Merging Your Mandrill Account With MailChimp – Part 1, we covered the process for merging your Mandrill with a MailChimp account. In this blog we continue to discuss the domain authentication to ensure those transactional emails keep flowing!

How to Set Up Sending Domains

Adding SPF and DKIM records and verifying ownership of your sending domains provides authentication to prove an email isn’t forged. Authentication helps legitimate senders prove that their email isn’t forged, and can help receiving servers like ISPs and corporate email servers control inbound spam. This is important because it prevents you from having to configure settings for different email clients and establishes a positive reputation for your domain. Essentially, it saves a lot of extra work in dealing with the variety of email clients your users receiving your emails use, and avoids having your “sent” emails ending up in junk or spam folders.

There are great articles to learn more about SPF and DKIM and domain verification  in your Mandrill account.

Verify the Domain

Log on to Mandrill and navigate to Settings/Domains/Sending-domains then click “Verify A Domain” and enter an email address for the domain you wish to verify.

You will receive an email with a confirmation link – click the link and you’ve verified the domain can accept incoming email.

Set Up SPF and DKIM for Your Sending Domains

To add the SPF and DKIM records for your sending domains, you’ll need to add ‘TXT’ records through your hosting provider, domain registrar, or DNS provider usually through a cPanel. We will demonstrate by logging onto our domain (using GoDaddy as an example), navigating to manage DNS settings and the location of files or records stored on the domain’s server.

SPF Record

If you don’t yet have an SPF record, add one for your domain by using the “Add Record.”

At a minimum, the value should be the following if you’re only sending mail through Mandrill for that domain:

 

 

If you already have a TXT record with SPF information, you’ll need to add Mandrill’s servers to that record by adding include:spf.mandrillapp.com in the record (before the last operator, which is usually ?all, ~all, or -all).

In GoDaddy this is done through a popup widget where you enter the above values as shown:

DKIM Record

Repeat the process for the DKIM using the “Add Record”

In GoDaddy, this is done through a popup widget where you enter the above values as shown:

DNS Providers

Here are useful links and information for several hosting and DNS providers provided by Mandrill’s help files that can guide you through your set up:

Provider	Links	Formatting Notes
CPanel (general) Many hosting providers offer CPanel to manage your domain. CPanel instructions are often similar among hosts that offer this option.	Bluehost GoDaddy	DKIM record typically escaped automatically. The ‘name’ of your DKIM record should be where yourdomain.com is replaced by the domain name where you’re adding the record. Most hosts that utilize cPanel don’t automatically add the domain name to the end of the record name. mandrill._domainkey.yourdomain.com
Amazon Route 53	Route 53 console Route 53 API
CloudFlare	SPF records	DKIM record escaped automatically.
	DKIM records
DNS Made Easy	DNS Made Easy	The ‘Value’ field where you enter the content for each record must be enclosed in quotes.
DreamHost	DreamHost
DynDNS	DynDNS	The ‘data’ field where you enter the value for each record must be enclosed in double quotes.
GoDaddy	Plesk Panel 9
	Plesk Panel 10
Hover	Hover
ZoneEdit	ZoneEdit

Download a PDF of this blog: Mandrill MailChimp 2