Sender addresses

When you sign up for Prezly, you automatically get a prezlymail.com sender address that you can use immediately for sending email campaigns and pitches. Replies from your contacts will go directly to your usual inbox.

You can also set up your own email address using your company domain directly in Prezly, helping your campaigns look more professional and benefitting your brand.

This guide will walk you through how to add and verify your company email so you can use it as your default sender address.

How to set up a custom sender address

Why do I need to verify my email domain?

This is to make sure that your emails are delivered successfully and do not end up in your contacts' spam folders when sending campaigns from your own sender domain (name@yourdomain.com).

To verify your domain, you will need:

Verifying your domain

You need to verify your domain for the sender address to work.

If you’re unsure about adding DNS records, use the Share Instructions button to email your IT team or domain provider, or copy the link to the instructions page.

If you’re doing it yourself and are already on the domain verification page, follow these steps below.

1. Pick the email/domain you want to verify

Access the Domain Verification page in your Prezly account here. You will see a list of your domains. Click the one you want to verify.

Please remember that if you don't verify your email with Prezly, you will only be able to send campaigns from the "@prezlymail.com" email.

2. Copy the CNAME records and add them to your domain provider

On the Domain Verification page, you’ll see 3–4 CNAME records, each with a Name and a Value. Copy both for every record and paste them into your domain provider’s DNS settings.

If you're not sure about how to handle those records, you can easily share them with your IT team or domain provider support, so they can either add those for you or further advise you on how to add them.

Click on the Share Instructions link and you send instructions directly via email or share the link to the instructions page.

3. Run the "status check" in Prezly

Once you have added the records with your domain provider, it will take between 30 minutes to 48 hours for Prezly to recognize that everything is set correctly. After that period of time, feel free to run a "Status Check", and when everything is linked up properly, you'll see a green sign next to the domain you verified.

How long does verification take?

DNS records may take some time to update. If you are still not able to verify your domain after 48 hours, we recommend you contact your domain registrar or DNS provider for further support.

Change default sender address

Once your domain is verified, you can click on your verified sender addresses to see:

FAQs

I cannot create a CNAME record prefixed with "_", what now?

This is a usual shortcoming of many DNS config dashboards across many providers. There are a couple of things you can do about it:

_dmarc.XXXXX.XXX TXT with value set to: ​ v=DMARC1; p=none;

My domain has suddenly become unverified, what happened?

This can be caused by a number of reasons. Here are a few of the most common problems:

If this happens, we recommend checking the above or contacting your DNS service provider.

💡Pro Tip: Verification is team-wide! Once you verify a domain, it is verified for all of your teammates, too. They will also be able to reliably send emails from that domain.

Why can't I verify my free email?

Due to strict policies to reduce spam emails, free email providers (gmail.com, yahoo.com, and mail.com) cannot be verified. We highly recommend you use a custom domain or your free prezlymail.com domain to send your campaigns.

Setting up a custom domain

See how to use your own domain for your Prezly site, e.g. sitename.yourbrand.com

Help

Why is Prezly asking to set CNAME records while SPF, DKIM and DMARC are TXT records?

Short answer: the CNAMEs finally resolve as TXTs to valid SPF, DKIM and DMARC records

Longer answer:

We're sending mails providing MAIL FROM SMTP command (a.k.a. return path) using @prezly-email.example.com. So the receiving server verifies SPF against the MAIL FROM address and it checks SPF records on prezly-email.example.com, instead of example.com. You can see the SPF spec for reference.

The receiving mail server sees it was sent by prezly-email.example.com with the From: header set to @example.com.

Please note that the DNS records are not created until you pass the verification and checking a record like email-XXXXXX.customers.prezly.io can be confusing.

If you want to have a look at how those records will look after passing the verification, you can check the setup for our domain:

For SPF:

For DKIM 1:

For DKIM 2:

Why am I getting a notification that no MX records are set up while setting up my sending domain?

Whenever you want to start sending emails from a specific domain, you need to make sure that the domain has MX records set up. MX records are the records needed for any domain to be able to receive an email. So if it's not set up spam filters will detect this as a problem and will either not deliver the email or will mark it as spam.

That's why it's required on our end to have these records before you can start mailing with a sending domain. They are required anyway if you want people to be able to reply to the emails you send through Prezly.