Troubleshooting branded sending domain issues

Setup your branded sending domain with ease. If you are not successful, follow these steps to troubleshoot any issues you might have. Or feel free to contact our team directly at [e-mail]

What you'll learn

Learn how to diagnose verification issues when setting up your branded sending domain (also known as a dedicated sending domain) in Shopwaive.

A branded sending domain enables you to send emails that appear from your brand, rather than from Shopwaive's shared domain.

Google and Yahoo have announced new sender requirements that they are planning to start enforcing Feb. 1, 2024. While already best practice, setting up a branded sending domain will be a requirement for bulk senders to land in Gmail inboxes.

Google considers those who send 5,000 or more emails to Google accounts per day to be "bulk senders." All traffic from a sender counts towards that 5,000 email threshold, including transactional emails.

Learn more about Gmail and Yahoo’s upcoming sender requirements from our partners at Klaviyo.

Before you begin

Before starting the troubleshooting steps below, confirm that you have attempted to verify your sending domain in Shopwaive and are seeing errors.

We recommend giving time for the DNS to propagate and for the cache to clear. Depending on your DNS provider, this process could take up to 48 hours.

Troubleshooting DNS authentication

Shopwaive requires 3 CNAME records for email authentication, one TXT (SPF) record and one MX record to confirm a custom MAIL FROM domain. When setting up a branded domain in Shopwaive, you’ll see similar records presented based on your subdomain choice.

If your brand chooses to use a 2nd level subdomain like example.message.yoursite.com, the root domain would be message.example.com and the sending domain would be example.message.yoursite.com.

In an example where the intended sending domain is message.yoursite.com, with “message” as the subdomain and “yoursite.com” as the root domain, the expected DNS records would be the following:

Type	Host name	Value
CNAME	su7yhggdkncv9jsjfhks0oplkg6s43jdn._domainkey	su7yhggdkncv9jsjfhks0oplkg6s43jdn.dkim.amazonses.com
CNAME	dfse99udhs63dhssskmnbzawqukgh._domainkey	dfse99udhs63dhssskmnbzawqukgh.dkim.amazonses.com
CNAME	ksldjnb64729jd7h231dsfdgjj3fj34hdf._domainkey	ksldjnb64729jd7h231dsfdgjj3fj34hdf.dkim.amazonses.com
TXT	message	v=spf1 include:amazonses.com ~all
MX	message	feedback-smtp.us-east-1.amazonses.com

If a priority is available when adding your MX record, use a priority of 10

A helpful set of tools to check if your records are propagating correctly are MxToolbox's DNS lookups:

• DNS lookup

• TXT lookup

You can use the DNS lookup tool to search the host for each of the CNAME records, and the TXT lookup tool for the TXT record.

CNAME lookup tip: Use the DNS check option from the dropdown on MxToolbox. Based on whether you are seeing values returned by the queries, there are some common errors that may be the source of the issue.

If queries are returning values

In order for your sending domain to be successfully verified in Shopwaive, the values returned by your queries must match those presented in Shopwaive exactly. Ensure that there are not any discrepancies between the values you are seeing returned, and those in Shopwaive.

Root domain being appended to values automatically

Some DNS providers expect a period (.) at the end of the added value. Without this period, the DNS provider assumes that the entire value field is a subdomain of the domain being configured, and will automatically add the root domain.

If queries are not returning values

Root domain duplicated in the hostname

We also recommend checking if your DNS provider expects only the subdomains in the host name fields, and automatically appends the root domain. For example, if you add the CNAME record message.domain.com it would automatically become message.domain.com.domain.com.

Instead, you might need to only add the “message” subdomain in this instance for the record’s host name to be message.domain.com. Compare your other DNS records to see if you need to append it or if your provider automatically does this.

Records being proxied

If your DNS provider allows you to proxy records, you will see issues with the setup of the branded domain in Shopwaive if this feature is enabled. This commonly happens with Cloudflare but is possible with other DNS providers too. You’ll need to disable the proxying of your records for them to resolve over the internet, and so their presence can be verified by the sending domain set up tool in Shopwaive. Record proxying will need to stay disabled after the set up process as well for emails to authenticate as expected.

Other DNS provider issues

DNS provider does not support @ symbol

In cases where a DNS provider does not support the symbol “@”, the root domain would need to be set as the hostname for the site verification record. The “@” symbol is the shorthand for the root domain (yourwebsite.com), so you can use either option depending on what your DNS provider supports.

DNS provider does not support underscores

Some DNS providers do not support underscores for CNAME records. However, in order for your sending domain to be functional within Shopwaive, these underscores are necessary.

If your DNS provider does not support underscores in your CNAME, we suggest first reaching out to your DNS provider’s support team and seeing if they can create the record for you. Often DNS providers will be able to manually adjust your CNAME to include the underscore if you reach out to them.

If your DNS provider ultimately cannot support underscores, consider using another provider as these will be necessary to your domain setup in Shopwaive.

A TXT value already exists on the root domain

If there is an existing TXT record on your root domain, you can append the Shopwaive value to your existing field. As long as the Shopwaive requested value is present, the record will be successfully validated when setting up your branded domain in Shopwaive.

DMARC

For emails to be DMARC compliant, the root domain on your account needs to align with the from-address domain of your emails.

For example, if you send an email using [e-mail] as the from-address, where example.com is protected by DMARC, your account will need to use a branded sending domain like message.example.com for all emails sent from Shopwaive to meet DMARC authentication requirements.