SPF & DKIM | Domain Whitelisting Email Tutorial

Log into your TEARcloud account here: TEARcloud.com

It is important to whitelist the domain you are sending emails with. Whitelisting your domain will tell ISP’s such as gmail, hotmail and yahoo that the third party smtp service sending the email is authenticated to so, resulting in higher inbox rates and avoiding having your emails end up in spam.


Whitelisting a domain for email sending is actually very easy. In your TEARcloud account, under SMTP, you will find the tab for whitelisting domains. Open it and add the domain you want to email with.

Once added you will see a SPF and DKIM record created. What is SPF and DKIM? They are both effective email signatures used in preventing spoofing, phishing or impersonation. When a recipient received your email, their spam filter automatically pokes your domain to see if the DKIM and SPF signature are there. If the spam filter see’s you have the proper SPF and DKIM signatures it will know you are authenticated to send emails with this domain and not mark the email as spam.


To add the SPF and DKIM signatures to your domain follow these steps. In this example I will be using the popular cPanel to add the 2 signatures. Depending where your domain is hosted, such as GoDaddy, your interface may look slightly different but the information being added is the same.


Scroll down in your cPanel to the icon named ‘Advanced DNS Zone Editor’. Open the page to add your SPF and DKIM records. Select your domain from the drop down menu.
Let’s start by adding your SPF record.


The name row is the first row shown in your TEARcloud dashboard. You can add this record with or without a period at the end. The second entry is your TTL, copy and paste that. The ‘type’ for both SPF and DKIM records are TXT, so we will select that. The last thing to add is the address, which is the bold text starting with spf1. Highlight that and past it. Make sure there are no spaces left in your entry.


Go ahead and click ‘Add Record’. Your domain now has the proper SPF record to be authorized with sending emails from TEARcloud. Let’s do the same thing for your DKIM record.


Your domain now has the proper SPF and DKIM records to ensure higher inbox rates when using TEARcloud SMTP. These changes may take between 15 minutes to 2 hours to fully propagate and take effect.

For any additional questions about whitelisting your domain don’t hesitate to create a support ticket in your TEARcloud dashboard:
TEARcloud.com