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Account

This guide will walk you through how to setup your account. We'll cover the basics of domain authentication, bounce rates, and resolving and preventing spam reports.

Domain authentication

Domain authentication involves verifying that an email is actually from you or your business. Think of it like a digital signature. It's one of the most important steps you can take to improve the deliverability of your campaigns. This article will explain why it's important to authenticate your campaigns, and how it changes the way email servers and email clients treat your emails.

We recommend continuing to read this section if you're experiencing any of the following:

  • High bounce rates

  • Low open rates

  • Emails arriving in junk or spam folder

  • Your email's from name contains "via" or "on behalf of"

This is what you will need to complete this section:

  • Your own domain name, which you are using for your email address

  • Access to your domain's DNS records

  • Knowledge with modifying DNS records

What is DKIM?

We use Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) to send emails on your or your company's behalf. DKIM authentication allows a sender (you in this case) to take responsibility for their emails, and is used to help separate legitimate emails from spam and phishing campaigns. To prove that the emails come from you or your company's domain, you need to authorize us to send emails on your behalf. This is the case with all Email Service Providers (ESPs).

Authenticate your domain

You can authenticate your domain by modifying the DNS records attached to a domain you own, so that any email sent with MailSauce is verified as coming from your own domain. Authenticating this way improves deliverability, as you are properly stating your identity to recipient mail servers. Think of it like showing someone an electric bill to provide proof of your address. Here's how to do it:

  1. Login to the MailSauce app (or click here)

  2. Click your profile image at the top right, then click "Settings".

  3. Click the "Domains" navigation button.

  4. In the "Add a domain" section, enter a fully qualified domain name to authenticate. Authenticating just the base domain name will not authenticate subdomains. For example, authenticating designco.com will not authenticate mail.designco.com.

  5. Click "Add domain"

  6. In the "Domains" box, your new domain should be listed. You'll notice it says "Not verified". That's because we've just added the domain, we haven't actually verified that you own it yet.

  7. Click "See details" and it will show you the DNS records that need adding to your domain. How to do this varies depending on the service you use to manage your domain or DNS. If you're having trouble finding how to alter your records, give us a shout here, or contact the provider you purchased your domain from. Here's an example of what the records should look like:

    Type Hostname Value
    CNAME msauce._domainkey.yoursite.com dkim.mailsauce.net.
    TXT yoursite.com v=spf1 include:servers.mailsauce.net ?all

  8. After you've added the DNS records to your domain host, in MailSauce click "Verify domain" in the same "See details" panel. It can take time for DNS record changes to update around the internet, so if our servers don't see the changes right away, try again later.

  9. After everything has been set up correctly, you'll see a success message when clicking the "Verify domain" button, and the list should refresh to show that the domain has not been verified.

Finishing up

The next time you send an email campaign, you will be able to select the authenticated domain for the sender's "From" address with a dropdown menu on the right.

Common issues

  • Some DNS hosts do not support semicolons or underscores, which are required to authenticate yourself with MailSauce. In some cases you can work around semicolons by replacing any occurrences of semicolons ; with a backslash and then a semicolon \;. If this doesn't work, or your host doesn't support underscores, you will need to switch DNS providers to authenticate your email.

High bounce rates

Your bounce rate is the percentage of email addresses that your campaign could not be delivered to. Email providers and anti-spam networks monitor bounce rates for every campaign you send, and use that information to decide if they'll accept mail from you in the future.

Besides affecting an individual sender's reputation, high bounce rates can land our sending IPs on blacklists, and potentially affect others who use our service

Don't send to stale contact lists

A stale contact list is a list of old email addresses that may have not been active for a long time. People change their email addresses all the time. People change jobs, change names, switch Internet or email providers, or let their domains expire. Some free email providers even close accounts after a certain period of inactivity.

Given enough time, most email addresses will stop working and start 'bouncing' which will be really bad for both ours and your reputation.

Don't use bought/artificial lists

Our Terms of Use don't allow the use of purchased, rented or third party lists. There's no way to verify how old the addresses on a bought or borrowed list are, nor do you know if permission was obtained from the people on the list.

Don't use 'spammy' language

Although not always completely avoidable, it's a good idea to avoid using spam-highlighted words if you're getting high bounce rates.

These are the sort of things you want to avoid:

  • An entire email composed of capital letters

  • Frequent, random capitalization

  • Excessive punctuation, especially '$' and '!'

  • Strange spacing or excessive amounts of blank space

  • Poor spelling

  • Frequent variations in text color and size

  • Scam-like subject lines

  • Emails that contain unbelievable claims about earning money fast, free products/services, adult content, gambling, prizes and pharmaceuticals. These are all prohibited by our terms of use.