Allowing your Domain
Reasons to Allow
- Remove the "Sent via Gainsightapp.com" tag.
- Increase the deliverability of the emails to Inbox instead of the Spam folder.
- If you have DMARC setting on, you will have to allow to send emails using Gainsight Email Infrastructure.
- If you have "-all" option at the end of your SPF setting, allowing is mandatory for using Gainsight email infrastructure.
What is Allowing?
Allowing is a functionality that shows ISPs for which SendGrid (Gainsight's ESP) has your permission to send emails on your behalf. This permission is given by the act of pointing very specific DNS entries from your domain registrar to SendGrid. Once these DNS entries are entered and propagated, recipient email servers and services will read the headers on the emails you send and check the DNS records to verify if the email is initiated from a trusted source. This drastically increases your ability to deliver email and allows you to begin building a sender reputation for your domain and for your IP addresses.
Types of Allowing
- Domain Allow: This type allows recipient email servers and services to verify the identity of the email sender back to the domain that the sender controls. This provides a layer of email authentication that helps in email deliverability. With only the domain allow, you are still subject to the reputation of your IP address.
- Email Links Allow: When you put a link or an image into an email and have the click or the open tracking turned on, then the click tracking links and the images will point to your domain. This tells the recipient email server that you are not trying to hide anything behind the links, and that you control the content of your emails. A few bad actors will use 3rd party link shortening services to populate the domains they list in their email content, and they do not include their own domain in those links. This practice is a red flag to spam filters.
Steps for Allowing
Once you have installed Gainsight and enabled your MDA, reach out to Gainsight Support so they can provide your DNS settings. For more information on entering a support ticket, refer to the How to Submit a Gainsight Support Ticket article.
In order to generate these DNS settings, the support team will need to know the following things:
- What sending domain would you like to use?
- What is the Tenant ID for your production instance of Gainsight NXT? You can find Tenant ID at Administration > Application Settings.
After this information has been collected, the support team will generate Domain & Email allow list in the form of CNAME records similar to the examples below:
Enter these settings in your DNS with the help of your IT team and communicate back to your support representative for confirmation. Once this confirmation has been provided, our team will run a validation test to resolve these values. If this is completed without any problems, then no other steps will need to be taken. However, if issues do arise, then our team will work with your IT team to investigate further.
Reputation Score Calculation
Reputation score calculation is automated based on the # of spam reports and # of bounces vs. the total # of emails sent. Gainsight email service is configured to maintain this at an optimum level by:
- Bounces are added to the master deny list which is maintained by Gainsight and we ensure future emails to that address are not attempted.
- Spam reports are added to the unsubscribed list automatically.
The usual behavior observed with most Gainsight customers is that they start with a low score since their contact list is often initially dirty, but within a few outreaches, it improves. The problem is minimal for Gainsight because the recipients are customers and not prospects. The average reputation of Gainsight customers is 98/100.
For more recommendations on Email deliverability and best practices, we recommend the guides published by Sendgrid.
FAQs
Does using SendGrid's automated security use up a DNS lookup on our SPF?
No, the SPF is managed by SendGrid.
How will using a subdomain affect sending emails from Gainsight?
Emails will be signed by the subdomain. Sending from your base domain will result in the envelope-from using the subdomain, while the header-from and reply-to will be the base domain, if configured as such.
Can we use custom DKIM selectors for the CNAMES?
Yes. S1 and S2 is default for SendGrid but we use gs and gs2. You may request a custom DKIM selector of up to three characters.
Can we allow a subdomain?
Yes.
