What is a DMARC Record?

There are three email “standards” in place designed to authenticate an email from your website to your recipient.

In other words, these standards are in place so that when you send an email from your site to someone with say a Gmail account, Gmail can verify that the email did indeed come from your website and not some scammer or spammer who is pretending to be you.

The three email standards are SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance).

I recently did a tutorial on how to setup SPF and DKIM to help you avoid the spam folder, so refer to that for the first two pieces of the puzzle.

By creating a record of each of these with our website’s host, the Gmails and Yahoos of the world can verify that messages which we send from our site are legit.

Just as importantly, without these records the Gmails and Yahoos of the world can and might mark messages which claim to be from our site as spam. In other words, once these records are created, it makes it much more difficult for spammers to successfully exploit/spoof our site for their scamming purposes.

How to Setup DMARC in cPanel

cPanel is a software most hosting providers use to allow clients to interact with their websites behind the scenes.

Among the many things you can do in cPanel is setting up a DMARC record for your website.

Log into your personal cPanel using the login info your hosting provider gave you, and find the Zone Editor icon.

You can just search for “Zone” in the search bar at the top to find it quickly:

Here you’ll find a list of all of your domains. Navigate to the domain you want to create a DMARC record for and click the “+ A Record” button:

Next, fill in the boxes like shown (replacing the domain with your own).

Here’s a sample DMARC record (feel free to paste this in, updating the email with your own):

v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; sp=quarantine; rua=mailto:dmarc-youremail@yourdomain.com;
pct=100; aspf=s; adkim=s

The language used in this record essentially says:

• First, it’s a DMARC record.
• That emails which don’t pass the authentication checks of SPF and DKIM should be quarantined.
• That you show get a report sent to your email address letting you know if and when emails which claim to be from your domain are quarantined.
• That this policy should be in effect for 100% of emails from your domain.

Click “Save Record” and the DMARC record is in place.

Again, do not do this until you’ve created SPF and DKIM records and have had them properly working for at least 48 hours.

In Summary

• Setting up a DMARC record on your website shows that you take authentication seriously in the eyes of your clients’ email service providers.
• This helps to ensure both that your emails end up in your recipient’s inbox, and anyone trying to spoof your website, IE sending emails from your website who aren’t you, will fail.
• Setting up a DMARC record is easy to do in cPanel using the information above, so get on it after you’ve set up your SPF and DKIM records!

Happy spoof-proof emailing!

Therefore, a series of standards have been put in place to help these email service providers authenticate the source of an email. SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, is one such standard. DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, is another. Setting up SPF and DKIM authentication on your website enables you to verify that your website is authorized to send emails.

Let’s talk about how to setup SPF and DKIM for your website which is a huge step you can take to keep your sent emails out of your client’s spam folders.

What is an SPF Record

Once again, SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. Creating a record of this for your website via your hosting provider essentially informs Gmail, Yahoo, etc. that your website is allowed to send emails.

Without this record, you can understand why your emails might be finding their way into your client’s spam folders. Someone’s Gmail account gets an email from your domain, and Gmail does a quick check to see that your domain has no SPF record.

In this case Gmail might say, “this domain has no authorization to send emails from it, so this email could likely be from a scammer.” and it gets flagged.

It’s also a slippery slope. The more emails from a domain which find their way into the spam folders of Gmail accounts, the more likely any email you send to a Gmail recipient will be marked as such.

If you are sending emails from your domain, meaning you have an email address tied to your domain which you use, you absolutely need to setup an SPF record.

What is a DKIM Record

Similar to the SPF record, a DomainKeys Identified Mail or DKIM record also is used to prevent spoofing.

This attached an encrypted digital signature to emails you send so that they can be verified on your recipient’s end.

This means that scammers trying to send emails which appear to be from your website have a much harder time as they can’t offer the same verification on their emails as you can.

Gmail, Yahoo, etc. can scan their emails and see that they’ve been modified in some way/aren’t legitimate from your site when you have DKIM enabled.

This is why it’s so essential to set up both SPF and DKIM: to thwart the efforts of scammers trying to use your domain and improve your own inbox delivery rate.

How to Setup SPF and DKIM

The easiest way for how to setup SPF and DKIM is to use your cPanel portal from your hosting provider.

cPanel is a relatively user friendly software designed to let you interact with everything on the backend of your websites.

This includes creating both an SPF and DKIM record for your website.

In the older (meaning a few years ago) days, it was much more complicated to set up SPF and DKIM. Now there’s a specific Email Deliverability link in your cPanel to automatically generate and enable SPF and DKIM if it’s not already on.

Step 1 – Log Into Your cPanel and Click “Email Deliverability”

The first thing to do is log into your cPanel using the link your hosting provider gave you and ID and password you set up.

Once in, you can navigate to the “Email” section or just search for “Email” in the top search bar. This will filter out non-email related apps and you’ll find “Email Deliverability”.

Click on this to see the status of email deliverability for your various domains on that hosting account.

Step 2 – Find Any Domains Which Say “Problems Exist” and Click “Manage” or “Repair”

Look for any yellow in the columns which say “Problems Exist”:

The text will specify what the exact issue is. You’ll see options to click “Repair” or “Manage” to the right.

First try clicking “Repair” as this typically resolves the issue, creating whichever records are needed.

Step 3 – Click “Install the Suggested Record”

If you clicked on “Manage” in the last step, you’ll see the SPF and DKIM record areas separated so that you can individually fix each one.

Under to the record you want to fix, click on the “Install the Suggested Record”:

If you do this on the DKIM record, you’ll get an additional warning message that you need to use this key if you send email from another server:

We’ll talk about this next.

Step 4 – Verify/Authenticate With Email Marketing Software

This is an additional step which only applies if you send emails from a third party, ie email marketing software.

In my case, I send emails to clients directly using my website’s email protal, but I also use MailChimp to send email blasts, automated email series/funnels, etc.

If you do this, you need to both verify and authenticate your domain with whichever email marketing software provider you use.

I’ll be showing the process with MailChimp, though it’s not too dissimilar no matter who you use.

First, navigate to the “Domains” section in the sidebar and click “Add/Verify Domain”.

This will prompt you to enter a valid email address associated with that domain which it can send an email with an verification link to:

Click the link in the verification email they send and you’ll verify that you have access to email for that domain:

Lastly, click “Start Authentication”. You’ll be given information to make a CNAME record back in the “Zone Editor” section of cPanel.

Select the domain you want to make the record for/you want to send emails for. Click “Add Record” and create it using the information MailChimp has given you to create the CNAME record.

Now back in MailChimp, click “Start Authentication” and if you’ve done it right, it should display as below:

Give a few minutes to detect the record if it doesn’t work right away.

And there you have it, how to setup SPF and DKIM so your emails avoid the spam folder and to crack down on scammers using your domain name in their emails.