Email Authentication

Please share this section with your Web Hosting Provider and Information Technology Support Staff.

Normally when ThinkSend deploys email, we set the email's public "From" email address to match your domain, so the email will appear to be coming from the client. So instead of seeing a "From" of say yourname@thinksend.com, it would be seen as coming "From" yourname@yourdomain.com.

However, there are also hidden email "Received from" tags in the email header (not to be confused with the public "From" address). The "Received from" and "Received by" tags show what domain actually sent the email. Email deployed using ThinkSend will by default show one of our domain names in the "Received from" tags (such as viewcampaign,com, createsend.com, etc.).

Many email servers today, check the hidden email headers, to ensure that the domain referenced in the public "From" address is the same as the hidden "Received from" tag. If these two fields do not match, the next thing email servers will typically check is to see if the domain used to send the email, is an "authenticated sender". If the public "From" and hidden "Received from" do not match, and the email server isn't "authenticated", then many companies will flag the email either as "Spam" or "Not Authenticated".

Your Web Host Provider or Information Technology Support staff, can make a simple change to your DNS, to add ThinkSend as an authenticated sender of your email. There are two main authentication standards you need to support called Sender ID and DomainKeys. What is important is that different Web Hosting Providers use one or a combination of both. We recommend adding them both to make sure you're covered at all of the major Internet Service Providers.

This only takes a few minutes to set up on your Web Hosting Provider, and it's something we recommend that every client do, before we deploy your first email campaign.

What's in it for you? All the Internet Service Providers like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail are using email authentication as an important layer in their spam fighting arsenal. By setting up ThinkSend as an authenticated sender, you can instantly bypass certain filters, giving your campaigns a better chance of arriving in the inbox.

Not only that, but many ISP's like Yahoo! and Hotmail will flag your email as authenticated, which helps to build trust between you and your subscribers and improves the chances of your emails being opened.

The only tricky part is that you'll need access to the DNS records for each domain you want to authenticate. And exactly how to change these DNS records tends to be different on each Web Hosting Provider.

If you need help to determine what and where to change on your DNS, please let us know. In order to help you, we would need your login username and password to manage your DNS.

Let us know if you plan to authenticate ThinkSend, and we will email you the keys to add to your DNS. We highly recommend completing this before we send your first campaign!