Email / Domain Settings
In an initiative to enhance the security of user inboxes, Gmail and Yahoo! have implemented new criteria that senders must adhere to by February 2024 to ensure their emails are delivered reliably to subscribers.
Please note AIQ uses Sendgrid for email communications.
Requirements AIQ already does for you:
- Custom SPF setup
- We recommend using the CNAME(s) provided
- SendGrid manages the SPF TXT records on your behalf using Sendgrid's Automated Security and provides the CNAME records that you need to add to your DNS record
- To check the SPF TXT record that SendGrid manages for your account, you can use the command dig on the first CNAME in the Domain Authentication section of your Sender Verification.
- DKIM setup
Requirements you may need to take action on:
- Authenticating your domain (if not done already)
- Please follow the steps below, Authenticating your domain.
- Creating DMARC records
- This would be done by you within your domain hosting site (i.e. GoDaddy, CloudFlare, Google Domains, etc.)
- Creating PTR records
- This would be done by you within your domain hosting site (i.e. GoDaddy, CloudFlare, Google Domains, etc.)
BIMI: Stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification. It's a standard that allows the use of brand-controlled logos within supported email clients to identify authenticated emails.
CNAME: Stands for Canonical Name. It's a type of DNS record that maps an alias name to a true or canonical domain name. The CNAME record creates an alias for subdomain.yourdomain.com.
DKIM: Stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. It's an email authentication method that allows the receiver to check that an email claimed to have come from a specific domain was indeed authorized by the owner of that domain.
DMARC: Stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. It's an email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol. It builds on SPF and DKIM protocols to improve and monitor the protection of the domain from fraudulent email.
DNS: Stands for Domain Name System. This is a naming system for domains on the internet. When we refer to your DNS, we are talking about your domain name that you want to send emails from, or that you want to link images from. When we talk about your DNS provider, we are talking about the service that hosts your domain name. For example, GoDaddy, Rackspace, or Cloudflare.
PTR: Stands for DNS Pointer Record. It is used in reverse DNS lookups to map an IP address back to its associated domain name. It's mainly used for network troubleshooting and email spam filtering to verify the legitimacy of an IP address.
SPF: Stands for Sender Policy Framework. This is an email authentication method designed to detect forging sender addresses during the delivery of the email.
Before sending your first email campaign, you will need to Authenticate your domain and set the Sender Settings.
Domain authentication shows AIQ that you do, in fact, own the domain name that you want to send from. To give AIQ permission to send using this domain, you point DNS entries from your DNS provider (like GoDaddy, Rackspace, or Cloudflare) to AIQ.
- Set up a DMARC policy for your sending domain. Fortunately, tools such as Valimail and similar ones are available to assist in creating DMARC records and aiding senders in achieving enforcement. We believe that if you're investing the effort to establish the required records for compliance, then advancing to secure your sending domain against misuse should be a straightforward task. It's important to remember that BIMI and various other inbox features necessitate domain owners to implement DMARC at an enforcement level.
- Ensure that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records.
1) In AIQ, select Email Settings
2) Select the Add domain button
3) Fill in the domain that you want to send from and add advanced settings as needed. Make sure that you only enter the name of your root domain and click Save domain.
Do NOT include www or http://www in this field. Your domain needs to match the domain of your FROM address on the emails you are sending out. For example, if I am sending an email from [email protected], I would set my domain authentication domain to be aiq.com.
- If you're using a domain that's already been setup with AIQ on a different account, you'll need to use a custom DKIM selector. Open "Advanced options" and enter your 3 letters or numbers into "Custom DKIM". For example, you could use "org", or "001".
4) The page will reload with 3 CNAMES.

5) Next, you need to add all of the CNAME records on this screen to your DNS host. This process varies depending on your DNS host.
6) Once you add the CNAME records to your DNS host, return to the Email settings page and click Refresh. (It can take up to 48 hours for the records to be verified after you upload them into your DNS host, so you will likely have to return later to verify.)
Tip: If you click refresh and only half of your CNAME records verify, this usually means that you need to wait a bit longer. It's also possible that you entered one of your records incorrectly.
1) Sender Name: Input your brand/company name
2) From email: Input the email address you want your email campaigns to be from. Usually, this is some sort of shared email address, i.e: [email protected], [email protected]. The domain in the sender's From header must be aligned with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain. This means that the email needs to exist, so if someone replies to it, it should go to an inbox.
3. Reply-to-name: When a customer replies to one of your emails, what name do want to be used as the Recipient. i.e. Support Team, AIQ
4) Reply-to-email: When a customer replies to one of your emails, input what email address you would like the responses to go to.
5) Input your Address, city, state, zip and country. This information is required on the footer of all email campaigns.
6) Click Save sender
- Keep spam rates reported in Google Postmaster Tools below 0.1%. Maintaining low levels of spam complaints is vital to increase the likelihood of your emails reaching the inbox. If you haven't done so yet, consider setting up Google Postmaster now to monitor your complaint rates. Additionally, you can use our Deliverability Insights to track your performance and view all essential statistics in one convenient location.
We use SendGrid, and they ensure that all emails sent through them use Format messages according to the Internet Message Format standard (RFC 5322).
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