There are three reasons that you should authenticate your Mailchimp domain:
- Your email campaign will show you as the sending domain and not Mailchimp and
- More of your emails will get through spam filters (and it will be more difficult for spammers to spoof your domain).
Authenticating your domain is a once-off activity. Firstly we need to check if our domain is authenticated within Mailchimp.
How to Check If Your Domain Is Authenticated in Mailchimp
Follow these steps to check if your domain is authenticated in Mailchimp.
- Login to Mailchimp.
- Click your name to the top right of the screen.
- Click Account.
- Click Settings then Domains.
If you see the word Authenticated on a green background then your domain is authenticated. If you see Verified on a blue background then your domain needs to be authenticated.
How to Authenticate Your Domain
If you are familiar with adding amending and adding DNS records then please follow the instructions provided by Mailchimp. If you have no idea what a DNS record is then keep reading 😉
Create an email message to your webhost or whoever your purchased your domain from. In the message copy and paste the following (note: where you see example.com change this to be your domain):
I use Mailchimp to send email marketing. Please add the following records for my domain:
- DKIM: Create a CNAME record for k1._domainkey.example.com with this value: dkim.mcsv.net
- SPF: Create a TXT record example.com with: v=spf1 include:servers.mcsv.net ?all
Please see Mailchimp’s recommendations should you have further questions.
Thank you
Once your provider has advised that they have made the change wait about 48 hours and check if your domain is now authenticated by:
- Login to Mailchimp.
- Click your name to the top right of the screen.
- Click Account.
- Click Settings then Domains.
- Click the word Authenticate (next to your domain name).
- Click Authenticate Domain.
- If you don’t see Authenticated then contact your provider and advise them that the domain isn’t authenticating.
Appreciate your two articles about the “spoofed” error message in Gmail and the one on how to authenticate a domain in Mailchimp!
Glad they helped 😀
Hello Gary, Merry Christmas first of all! Thanks for the very informative article, it helped me a lot. I did all the steps and now have an authenticated domain, but I keep getting Gmail spoof mail warnings when I get a mail from Mailchimp alerting me that I have a new subscriber, so I’m concerned something is still wrong. It’s been more than 48 hours since I authenticated. Any clue? Thanks! –Mike
Merry Christmas to you too Mike 🙂
I see that the SPF record has been added to your domain however it looks like the DKIM (“Create a CNAME record for k1._domainkey.example.com with this value: dkim.mcsv.net”) is missing in your domain records. I recommend adding the DKIM record.
In addition, you may need to train Gmail that the Mailchimp notification emails aren’t spam/spoof. You should be able to mark the emails in Gmail as safe and Gmail will learn from your manual input.
Hi Gary, thanks for the interesting article. I already verified our domain and still our mailings get a warning in Gmail. Do you have any idea what causes this? Thanks!
Hi Nina,
What warning is seen in Gmail? Also, what domain are you using as your sending domain in Mailchimp?
Thanks