Verifying a sender

Setting up the address you send from, and why DNS is part of it.

Before you can send you need a sender: the email address that appears in the from line of your newsletter. That address has to be verified.

Start on this early. Verification depends on DNS records, and those need time. You can do all the other preparation while you wait.

Why this is necessary#

Sending mail on behalf of an address that is not yours is exactly what spammers do. So Gmail, Outlook and the rest check whether the sender demonstrably belongs to the domain. Skip that, and your newsletter lands in spam or is refused outright.

Setting the DNS records is how you provide that proof. Your mail is signed digitally, and returned mail ends up in the right place.

Your newsletters go through a European sending service that keeps everything within the EU. That is why your sender carries the label EU sending.

Adding a sender#

1. Go to Senders and add one. Enter the name recipients should see, and the email address.
2. You get a confirmation mail at that address. Click the link in it. That proves you control the mailbox. Until then the status reads Awaiting confirmation.
3. DNS verification then starts and you are shown the records to set.

If the confirmation mail does not arrive you can have it sent again. Check your spam folder too.

The DNS records#

You are shown these records:

• Two DKIM records (CNAME). Every mail is signed digitally, so the receiving server can check that the content was not altered in transit and really comes from your domain. The keys are rotated automatically, so you never have to change these records afterwards.
• A Return-Path record (CNAME). A separate subdomain of your own domain where returned mail arrives. Its name is fixed, there is nothing to choose.
• A DMARC record (TXT). Recommended, not required. If you already have one, it is shown with the record and there is nothing to add. If it contains aspf=s, change that to aspf=r. Otherwise verification will not succeed.

Enter these records at your DNS provider. As with your own domain, there are toggles to match the notation to your DNS panel, and a button to copy everything at once.

Waiting and checking#

Verification happens automatically, but the Check status button asks for an immediate look at whether the records are found. The status moves through these stages:

Verification failed means nothing is broken: checking simply stopped. Fix the records and restart verification with the button on the sender.

Senders without EU sending#

A sender you added earlier may still send through a service outside the EU. You can tell by the missing EU sending label. Such a sender keeps working with the records it already had: DKIM signing and a bounce subdomain with a prefix of its own, send by default.

If you want it to send within the EU as well, get in touch. The sender then has to be verified again with the new records, and you get an email about it. Until verification is complete you cannot send from that sender; your other senders keep working. Records no longer listed with the sender afterwards can be removed.

Several senders#

You can have more than one, for example news@yourband.com and info@yourband.com. Drag them into order; the top one is the primary and is suggested by default on a new newsletter.

If you add an address on a domain you already use, it sends through the same service as the sender already there. Its records are in place already, so there is nothing new to set up.

Practical tips#

• Use an address on your own domain. A free Gmail or Hotmail address cannot be verified as a sender, because you do not control the DNS of those domains.
• Do not remove the DNS records after verification. They have to stay, or sending eventually stops working.
• If you switch DNS providers, check that these records came along.

Updated on 13 October 2026