Domain authentication proves that your domain is legitimate and authorized to send emails on behalf of your organization. Proper domain authentication helps prevent email spoofing and phishing and improves email deliverability rates.
Benefits of authenticating your domain
Improve Email Deliverability: Ensures your emails reach the inbox and are not marked as spam.
Prevent Phishing and Spoofing: Protects against unauthorized use of your domain in malicious emails.
Enhance Brand Trust: Builds customer trust by proving your emails are genuine.
Compliance: Meets regulatory and industry standards for secure communications.
How to authenticate a domain
As an overview, you must update your DNS table on your domain host's settings page with new CNAME records. Standard plan users can add 1 domain in folk, and Premium plan users can add up to 3 domains.
Please use this tool to find the name of your domain provider (e.g., GoDaddy, CloudFlare, Wix, WordPress). If you don't have access to your domain provider, you can find out who in your company has this access before setting up domain authentication so they can help you. If using Sendgrid as a Sender, this won’t work, and folks currently use Sendgrid as our email provider.
What is a DNS Table?
What is a DNS Table?
A DNS table is a database that enables the translation of human-friendly domain names into the numerical IP addresses used by computers to access websites. You need to add a new record to a DNS table for DMARC to help receiving mail servers determine whether an email claiming to come from your domain is legitimate and instruct them on handling emails that fail authentication checks.
What is a CNAME record?
What is a CNAME record?
CNAME records redirect domain requests to another domain, allowing multiple domain names to point to the same IP address without creating separate A records. They essentially create an alias for subdomain.yourdomain.com, which will be the signature on your messages.
When ready, go to Settings & members > Senders and select 'New Sender'. Add the Sender email and name you would like to your folk account and select 'New sender'.
The Sender email and name will appear for your recipients when you email them. (Your domain must match the domain of your FROM address on your emails. E.g. if I would like to send emails from example@folk.app, I would set my domain authentication domain to be folk.app). Authentication works only for domains owned by your team or company. Personal addresses such as @gmail.com or @outlook.com can’t be authenticated on folk.
Once you've saved the Sender email and name, you'll need to edit your DNS records for your domain. Here, you copy the 'Host' and 'Value' data and apply them to your DNA Records under the CNAME field type. This can either be done automatically through the third-party app Entri by selecting 'Auto-configure' or manually by copying and pasting the data to your DNS records.
Here is an example of CNAME records for the domain called testdomain.com:
Automatic DNS setup
Select the 'Auto-configure' button. This will open a pop-up window from Entri, prompting you to log in to your domain host's website in a new tab. If Entri doesn't automatically recognise where your domain is hosted, you can select it from the list of popular domain hosts or search for it inside the pop-up.
Once logged in to your domain host, a message will ask whether you consent to Entri adjusting your DNS settings.
❗️Please note: after Entri has updated your records to your domain host, it can take up to 48 hours for them to be verified, so you might have to check later to confirm. You cannot verify the sender until this is confirmed as verified (see details about verifying the sender here).
Manual DNS setup
Instead of using Entri, you can manually add the 3 DNS CNAME records as shown in the settings for this Sender in folk.
On your domain host's settings page, navigate to where you can edit your DNS table. Here are some popular domain providers and instructions on setting up DNS for them.
Add a new record to your DNS table and copy the details for the
hostandvaluessections.Some domain providers will only ask you to fill in the name of your subdomain when adding the DNS records before filling in the rest of the details, resulting in a CNAME entry with too much information that fails authentication. GoDaddy, Amazon Route 53, and Namecheap are providers that do this. If this happens, please ensure the data matches what folk provides you in the CNAME records table.
If your domain doesn't validate initially, please check the CNAME records you've copied. You may have incorrectly applied the data.
❗️Please note: after you upload the records to your domain host, it can take up to 48 hours for them to be verified, so you might have to check later to confirm. You cannot verify the sender until this is confirmed as verified (see details about verifying the sender here).
Verifying senders
Once your domain is verified, a green tag will appear next to the domain showing as 'Verified' and a grey tag showing 'Unverified' for the Sender email on your Senders page within your Settings, as shown in this example below:
A verification email should be automatically sent to the Send email address provided during setup, but if not, you can resend.
When you receive the email, you can click the 'Verify your email' button to verify that you own this email address (you have 48 hours to do so). Once validated, members of your folk workspace can also use this sender email address in your shared groups when sending an email.
You can have multiple senders under one domain within your folk account. 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.
DMARC section
To increase your email deliverability, we suggest applying DMARC. More details can be found here.
Check & delete your domain details
If you want to check your domain details at any point, visit Settings & members > Senders, select the top three dots in the box for that domain, and then 'Reverify domain', as shown below. You can also delete your domain from here.
SPF and DKIM
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) are automatically implemented in folk to provide extra security when you authenticate your email domain.
SPF
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication standard developed by AOL that compares the email sender’s 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 DKIM?
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is designed to help email providers prevent malicious email senders by validating emails from specific domains. DKIM signing will be enabled on all domain email addresses automatically through folk.
How-to video
💬 Do you have any questions or feedback? We'd love to hear from you! You can find the folk team via:
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