Are email messages from your domain going to your recipient’s SPAM folder? SPF, DKIM and DMARC are email authentication records for your domain that work together to prevent spam, email spoofing, and malicious activity for your domain email. Setting up Email Authentication records for your domain will improve email deliverability and increase the odds of emails from your domain arriving in your recipients’ Inbox versus the SPAM folder.
Spammers are always looking for new ways to get past even the most aggressive of spam filtering. This has resulted in Email Providers such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and more having to modify policies for incoming email and change how they accept incoming email messages in order to decipher between legitimate emails and spam.
One of the policies for handling incoming email most popular email providers have in place is the marking of all unauthenticated emails as SPAM regardless of message content. An email may also be considered unauthenticated if the email authentication DNS records such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC are not present. Follow the instructions below to be sure you are taking all available steps to ensure your mail is accepted by popular Email Providers.
How to Install a SPF and DKIM record within cPanel
Login to cPanel – https://yourdomain.com/cpanel
Under the Email section, click on the ‘Email Deliverability‘ icon
Locate the domain you want to setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC for and click ‘Manage‘
Under the DKIM Section, click ‘Install the Suggested Record‘ to add your DKIM Record
Under the SPF section, click ‘Install the Suggested Record‘ to add your SPF record.
How to Setup a DMARC Record within cPanel
Login to cPanel – https://yourdomain.com/cpanel
Under the Domains section, Click on ‘Zone Editor‘
Click ‘Manage‘ next to the domain you want to add the DMARC for
Click on the arrow next to the ‘Add Record‘ button to activate the drop-down menu
Select ‘Add DMARC Record‘ from the list
Click on ‘Optional Parameters‘ to expand the options for the DMARC record
Select ‘Quarantine‘ and ‘Strict‘ in both sections (or choose based on your preference)
Enter an email address to send reports to in both the ‘Send Aggregate Mail Reports To‘ and ‘Send Failure Reports To‘ field
Select Add Record to Save
That’s it! You’ve successfully added an SPF, DKIM and DMARC record for your domain. These records are DNS records. It will take some time for these records to become fully effective as this is a DNS change and will require propagation which generally takes up to 24 hours to occur.