Authenticating your custom domain in Recharge
Your subscribers’ email inboxes work hard to fight spam, so it’s important to ensure they can trust your Recharge notification emails. One way to do this is through email authentication, required by Google and Yahoo.
This step-by-step guide provides instructions on authenticating your email domain in Recharge, ensuring your subscribers' mailbox providers recognize your store's subscription notifications as originating from your store, and not from someone attempting to impersonate it.
Email authentication
Email authentication is a process that verifies the legitimacy of an email message by providing proof that the sender owns the from email address domain. Ensuring your identity is verified establishes trust between you and your recipients.
The most common email authentication standards are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Mail servers use these methods to verify that incoming emails are from legitimate senders, protecting your brand and customers from scammers.
In addition to protection from malicious activity, implementing these protocols can help improve deliverability, allowing mailbox providers to confirm your identity as the sender.
Disclaimer: Email providers such as Google and Yahoo, continue to implement strict and secure standards for email deliverability.
To protect against new spam filtering methods targeting non-authenticated domains, notification emails from your store are sent from no-reply@rechargeapps.com. You must authenticate your email domain to continue sending from your store’s email address.
See Confirming email notifications meet Google and Yahoo's deliverability standards for more information about these requirements.
Understanding Recharge's default setup
You can configure your Recharge notifications to come from an authenticated custom domain.
As of February 2024, you must authenticate your custom domain, as required by Google and Yahoo. Authenticating your domain ensures that your emails are sent directly from your domain, and customers no longer see no-reply@rechargeapps.com
as the from address.
If you do not have an authenticated domain, Recharge automatically sends notifications from no-reply@rechargeapps.com
.
Authenticate your custom domain
Follow the steps outlined below to authenticate your custom domain.
Step 1 - Configure your custom sending domain
Authenticating a custom domain enables you to send notifications from your store's domain instead of no-reply@rechargeapps.com
.
This process satisfies Google and Yahoo's sending requirements beginning February 2024 and also improves deliverability rates and domain reputation for your store.
To authenticate your domain, start by configuring a custom sending domain for your store:
- Click Settings in your merchant portal and select Notifications.
- Navigate to the Domain authentication section. Click Add domain.
- Enter your domain in the Add a domain to authenticate box and select Next, which redirects you to the Domain details page, where Recharge automatically generates three DKIM records for your domain.
- Copy the three DKIM records generated.
- Work with your company's DNS provider's platform to update the DKIM records and make the necessary changes.
- This step requires you to complete tasks outside of Recharge. You may need to consult your IT team on these steps or contact your DNS provider if you need assistance.
- After adding the DKIM records to your domain navigate back to the Recharge Domain details page and select Verify.
- The status for each DKIM record will update to Verified if your records are valid
- The status for each DKIM record will update to Not verified if your records are invalid
- Once verified, emails sent with a from address including this domain will automatically be sent from this domain.
Step 2 - Configure a DMARC policy for your domain
Work with your DNS provider to configure a DMARC policy. Google recommends beginning with an enforcement policy of none
if you did not implement a DMARC policy previously.
Review Google's guide to defining your DMARC record to learn more about DMARC policies.
Step 3 - Verify that your custom domain is fully authenticated
Navigate back to the Domain authentication section of your Notifications page in the Recharge merchant portal to confirm that your domain is fully authenticated.
You should see your domain listed with a populated DMARC policy and a verified status. Review the steps above and work with your DNS provider to update your domain's settings if these values are not visible.
Delete a domain
To delete a domain:
- Click Settings and select Notifications in the Recharge merchant portal.
- Under the Domain authentication section, select the domain you want to delete.
- Click Delete, then select Confirm on the popup.
Troubleshooting
- Review Recharge's guide Domain authentication status stuck in pending
- If you are receiving an error message from your domain provider that indicates there is an issue with multiple stores on a single domain, set up your first store and then contact the Recharge Support team for assistance.
- Different domain hosting services may expect the record to be formatted differently. If authentication does not work with your full domain, use only the _rec, _rec2, or em(number assigned when verification started) as the host names.
- Some DNS providers might add the top-level domain to the DKIM records, for example,
rec._domainkey.yourdomain.com
. When copying your DKIM records from Recharge you only need to copy therec._domainkey
value, without your added domain.
- Some DNS providers might add the top-level domain to the DKIM records, for example,