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How to authenticate a domain?
How to authenticate a domain?

Learn how to authenticate a domain and get started sending emails from folk

Simo Lemhandez avatar
Written by Simo Lemhandez
Updated over a week ago

Before you start

  • Authenticating a domain is required to send emails from your own email address rather than a generic email address created by folk (such as no-reply@folk-messages.com).

  • Authentication works only for domains owned by your team or company. Personal addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL can’t be authenticated on folk.

Benefits of authenticating your domain

  • It avoids emails being labeled as spam.

  • It will prevent other information displaying next to the sender's name in certain emailing tools (for example “sent from folk.app”).

  • It prevents emails being tagged with “via folk-mail.com" in some email clients, such as Gmail or Outlook.

How to authenticate a domain?

Just start by adding the sender you would like in your folk account. E.g. if you want to send emails with “me@domainname.com”, just add this sender. You will then be asked to authenticate the domain name domainname.com.

In order to set up your domain, you must submit the DNS records provided by folk to your DNS hosting provider (for example GoDaddy, CloudFlare, Name.com, etc).

Find out who your hosting provider is and if you have access. If you don't have access to your DNS or hosting provider, find out who in your company has this access before setting up domain authentication.

It can take up to 48 hours for the records to verify after you upload them into your DNS host, so you might have to check later to verify.

If two or more of your sender addresses use the same domain, you will only need to configure the DNS entries for this domain once. DKIM signing will be enabled on all email addresses of the domain.

Many DNS providers will only ask you to fill in the name of your subdomain. E.g. for folk._domainkey.example.com they may expect you to enter folk._domainkey as the name of the record. GoDaddy, Amazon Route 53, and Namecheap, are among providers that automatically add your domain to your new DNS record values, resulting in a CNAME entry with too much information that fails authentication, e.g. em123.yourdomain.com.yourdomain.com. Be sure to check your CNAME if your domain doesn't validate initially.

You will still be able to remove a domain at any time from your “Senders” page on the settings.

Adding and removing senders

After this, you will be able to add senders associated with your authenticated email domain. For example, after authenticating domainname.com, you will be able to add, from the settings page, the sender me@domainname.com.

Note: you will receive a confirmation email. You must click the link in order to validate that you are the owner of this email.

Afterward, members of your folk Workspace will also be able to use this sender in your shared groups.

FAQs

I don't know my domain provider. How to find it?

You can find your domain provider by using this tool.

Do I need SPF?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication standard developed by AOL that compares the email sender’s actual IP address to a list of IP addresses authorized to send mail from that domain. The IP list is published in the domain’s DNS record.

folk handles SPF authentication for you. Emails sent from folk include a return-path header. When a recipient mail server receives one of our emails and checks the SPF record of the domain in our return-path, they will see that our sending IP addresses are authorized senders. This means emails sent through folk will pass authentication automatically and you don't need to set up any records yourself.

What is a CNAME?

The CNAME record creates an alias for subdomain.yourdomain.com and will be what your messages are signed by, so your recipients will be able to see what you have chosen for your CNAME.

What is my DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System. This is a naming system for domains on the internet. When folk refers to your DNS, we mean the domain name that you want to send emails from. When we talk about your DNS provider, we mean the service that hosts your domain name. For example, GoDaddy, Rackspace, or Cloudflare.

What is DKIM?

DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail which was designed to help email providers prevent malicious email senders by validating emails from specific domains.

What is my DMARC?

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