Connecting your domain to Essentials is the first step to gaining visibility and control over your email authentication setup. By following this guide, you allow the platform to review your current SPF configuration, enable Instant SPF, and start monitoring DMARC reports to show how your domain is being used to send email.
Domain Configuration
When you first log in to Essentials, you are guided through the Domain Configuration setup flow. This guided experience helps you quickly connect your domain and ensure your email authentication and DMARC record are properly configured.
The Domain Configuration flow presented below will be visible until both DMARC and SPF records are properly pointed to Valimail. Once these records are in place, the configuration page becomes available, where you can add senders to your SPF configuration and update the DMARC policy.
The process begins by reviewing your domain’s current DMARC and SPF records. Save a backup of these records by clicking the Download Records button. Essentials will mirror the SPF record into our domain configuration.
As you continue through the flow by clicking Next, you’ll be prompted to log into your DNS provider so you can make the required DNS updates. If you do not have access to your DNS provider, click the download button to get a copy of the records, which you can then share with the person who manages your DNS.
Once the necessary DNS records are added, click the Check Records button to confirm everything is set up properly.
After successful validation, your domain is connected and ready for monitoring, allowing Essentials to begin analyzing DMARC data and providing insights into how your domain is being used to send email.
How Essentials Handles Your Existing SPF Record
During the setup, Essentials automatically captures the directives from your current SPF record and includes them in its own SPF responses. This means that once your SPF record is updated to point to Valimail, your existing sending sources will continue to work without interruption.
To keep your configuration clean and efficient, we recommend reviewing the directives from your old SPF record and adding those services as senders in Valimail. This allows Essentials to manage them more effectively.
If your previous SPF record exceeded the 10 DNS lookup limit, adding those services to the Approved Senders list is especially important. Instead of returning a long list of all imported directives, Essentials will provide more targeted SPF responses for each sender, helping you stay within limits and improving overall reliability.
To add approved senders to your Essentials domain configuration, follow these steps:
Go to DOMAINS in the side navigation.
In the list of domains, click on your domain name.
Click on Enabled Sender or Netblock.
Add each sender one by one.
If your old SPF record had IPv4 or IPv6 directives (individual or blocks of IPs), you can add them to the configuration as Netblocks.