What is email deliverability?
Whether or not your emails are received by your supporters or those emails are sent to a spam folder is determined by many technical factors. Email requirements and rules can be complex, but not to worry, Funraise has designed our email sending functionality to ensure your emails are delivered and accepted by inboxes without any action needed from you.
Sending emails from your own domain requires following strict rules from Google and Yahoo which will require technical action taken by your team. Web admins can obtain and configure DKIM and SPF records from Funraise, enabling your organization to send emails using your own domain address.
Standard email sending
Emails are sent from noreply+[your-domain]@funraise.org
By default, all emails sent from Funraise will be sent from noreply+[your-domain]@funraise.org and the reply-to address will be your default organization email address or the From Address that you've selected.
The domain from your organization email address will be used to populate the noreply+[your-domain]@funraise.org sending address.
As a reminder, your organization email address also includes a sender name. So your supporters will see the following when receiving emails, for example:
From:
Janet Smith<noreply+worldpeace@funraise.org>Reply-to:
jsmith@worldpeace.org
We recommend a sender name and that is helpful to your supporters because this part of a sender address is often the first thing a supporter will see when receiving your email. For example:
Donor Services<noreply+worldpeace@funraise.org>
Learn more about configuring your organization email addresses. Only paid accounts can manage organization email addresses — free accounts will always use noreply@funraise.org as the sender and reply-to address.
Advanced email sending (SPF & DKIM)
To have emails sent from your domain directly, you can contact Funraise's support team (support@funraise.org) to obtain SPF and DKIM authentication records that can be added to your domain settings. When reaching out, please include the email address for the member of your team who has access to configure your domain settings.
Once you have SPF and DKIM configured for your sending domain, your organization email addresses will be used as both the reply-to and the sender address.
☝️ Configuring a custom sending domain requires technical knowledge
It's important to note that while Funraise makes DKIM and SPF records available, we are not able to support the configuration of your domain. You'll need technical expertise on your end to complete and manage this setup. Incorrect configurations can cause your emails to not be delivered. You can find helpful articles from common hosts: Squarespace, GoDaddy, Bluehost.
✅ Already configured your sending domain with Funraise?
If you're organization has already worked with Funraise's support team to obtain and configure SPF and DKIM records, you're good to go! This change does not impact existing SPF & DKIM records.
🧠 For your education — What are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC?
The following information is not necessarily required to set set up SPF and DKIM, but we've provided a quick summary of these tools for web admins to review if needed. The following informations comes from the smart people at Cloudflare.
DMARC, DKIM, and SPF are three email authentication methods. Together, they help prevent spammers, phishers, and other unauthorized parties from sending emails on behalf of a domain they do not own.
DKIM and SPF can be compared to a business license or a doctor's medical degree displayed on the wall of an office — they help demonstrate legitimacy. Meanwhile, DMARC tells mail servers what to do when DKIM or SPF fail, whether that is marking the failing emails as "spam," delivering the emails anyway, or dropping the emails altogether.
Domains that have not set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correctly may find that their emails get quarantined as spam, or are not delivered to their recipients. They are also in danger of having spammers impersonate them.
SPF — Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a way for a domain to list all the servers they send emails from. SPF records list all the IP addresses of all the servers that are allowed to send emails from the domain.
DKIM — DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) enables domain owners to automatically "sign" emails from their domain, just as the signature on a check helps confirm who wrote the check. The DKIM "signature" is a digital signature that uses cryptography to mathematically verify that the email came from the domain.
DMARC — Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) tells a receiving email server what to do given the results after checking SPF and DKIM. A domain's DMARC policy can be set in a variety of ways — it can instruct mail servers to quarantine emails that fail SPF or DKIM (or both), to reject such emails, or to deliver them.
DMARC policies are stored in DMARC records. A DMARC record can also contain instructions to send reports to domain administrators about which emails are passing and failing these checks. DMARC reports give administrators the information they need to decide how to adjust their DMARC policies (for example, what to do if legitimate emails are erroneously getting marked as spam).
DMARC records are not provided by Funraise, these are policies you'll configure on your own domain.