You may have seen the following banner appear at the top of your account:


This relates to recent changes with how Google and Yahoo, as well as other providers, handle inbound communication from senders with particular emphasis on bulk senders.

You can see which channels are affected and what changes need to be made by going to this link in your account:

https://dashboard.edesk.com/channel-domain

These channels all use the “Send from own email address” as their Sending mode and in this article we will go over what changes you will need to make to those channels.

A little background on the recent changes

During October of 2023 Gmail and Yahoo announced that there would be a requirement for DMARC to be present in a bulk senders DNS record.

A DMARC record is a text entry within the DNS record that tells the world your email domain’s policy after checking SPF and DKIM status. DMARC authenticates if either SPF, DKIM, or both pass. This is referred to as DMARC alignment or identifier alignment.

The reason for this change is that Google and Yahoo wish to take steps to help make email communication more safe and secure. By enforcing validation they can help prevent unwanted spam and curtail nuisance communication. By validating your DMARC records you can help improve inbox placement and help providers identify you as a legitimate sender.

How does this affect eDesk?

We have already made sure our records are up to date so all messages from our own domain addresses are compliant with the required changes.

If your channel is set to use “Send directly from the channel’s eDesk email address” we will have you covered and no further action will be required.

Where you will need to make a few changes will be if you use the option:

“Send from own email address”

A few additional changes will need to be made to allow us to send emails via your domain on your behalf.

We will cover these changes in the next section

Send from own email address

Originally when this setting was selected all you were required to do was add an SPF record to your DNS records. With the change to DMARC a few additional records will need to be applied.

When you navigate to your channel settings now you will see the following Notification on screen:


You can click on the 'See details here' to be brought to a screen with some more information on the channel's status. The screen will show you when verification was last checked and the status of DKIM status, Mail from Status etc.

If you click on Download .csv DNS record set you will see what records need to be added to your domain's DNS records.

These will come in the form of:

  • 1 MX record
    • Be aware that some DNS Services may require you to make a slight change to this record. Please check with your provider how they accept this record.
      • Some DNS services will accept the full record in one line.
      • Other DNS services may require the numeric value, the "Priority Value", to be placed in a separate field.
        • In the example below, the "10" value will go in Priority field or equivilently named field.
        • The "feedback-smtp.us-east-1.amazonses.com" will go into the Value field or equivilently named field.
  • 1 TXT record
  • 3 CName records

Once these have been inserted into your DNS records, eDesk will be able to send fully compliant messages using your domain address.

You will need to make these changes for each channel that uses the Send from own email address option.

One thing to note: if multiple channels use the same domain address, in our example edesk.com, you will only need to update the DNS record once.

For example, say on our hypothetical eDesk account we have the channels:

  • hello@edesk.com

  • deliveries@edesk.com

  • orders@edesk.com

Your DNS record would only need to be updated once and the change would be applied to all channels as they share the same domain address.

However, if you have multiple channels that use different domains:

  • hello@edesk.com

  • hello@repricer.com

  • hello@feedbackexpress.com

The DNS records for each domain will need to be updated to be DMARC compliant.

You can also check the status of any other channels that need updating on the Channel Domains Screen:

Further Readings

 

If you would like to find out more about 'Sending emails via SMTP', click here.

If you would be interested in learning more about different 'Sending modes', click here.