How To Add New Dkim Record To Bluehost

One ordinarily overlooked area in cPanel is email authentication. Maybe information technology's 1 of those things that you never bothered checking out, or possibly it just looked a little intimidating.

Regardless of whether you know it is there or what it does you may want to look at information technology when you get a moment of spare time. It can potentially reduce the spam postal service that you receive equally well as increase the run a risk that the mail yous send out arrives in someone's inbox instead of a junk/spam folder. Y'all exercise desire your messages delivered to someone'southward inbox don't you?

cPanel electronic mail authentication allows yous to enable DKIM keys, and SPF records for your domain very easy.

Here is a lilliputian more than information about each:

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) – is used to verify that an inbound email message is really from the stated sender, and that the message has non been altered or tampered with. If yous enable DKIM, letters are digitally signed using a private fundamental. The message recipient uses DNS to retrieve the sender's public key in social club to verify the message's signature. If the signature is invalid, then the message is assumed to be forged and spam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail
http://world wide web.dkim.org/

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) – specifies which mail servers are permitted to send mail on behalf of your domain. Some mail service servers don't have incoming messages if information technology comes from a domain that doesn't accept an SPF record. Without an SPF record a message may cease up in the receivers spam/junk folder, or information technology may be rejected completely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
http://www.openspf.org/

Enabling DKIM and SPF tin help reduce the amount of spam y'all receive, and increase the likelihood that the messages you transport out will make it in the receivers inbox rather than in their spam/junk binder. There are apparently no guarantees, and this assumes that your host has set the mail server and records properly to begin with. It besides assumes that the IP address that your website happens to exist on or using isn't blacklisted for some reason.

Before enabling either of these, make sure you lot have a good understanding of what they do. Adding a SPF record is a little more confusing in cPanel than DKIM. If you are not certain virtually the procedure, then you may desire to inquire your host for aid.

Later on calculation/enabling i or both yous should let 24-48 hours (usually less) for the DNS records to propagate.

If for some reason you added a custom SPF tape in the past you lot would desire to combine them rather than have ii carve up records.

How To Enable DKIM And SPF In cPanel

Locate the Mail service section/area.

Select Electronic mail Authentication.

cPanel Email Authentication

Scroll down to DKIM and click the Enable button.

Come back to the SPF department and click the Enable push button for SPF.

enable-dkim-spf

After enabling them y'all should see something like this:

cPanel DKIM SPF Enabled

If y'all need to customize the SPF record y'all can exercise and so in the Avant-garde Settings area underneath the Enable button.

The options are:

Additional Hosts that send mail for your domains (A)
Additional MX servers for your domains (MX)
Additional Ip blocks for your domains (IP4)
Include List (INCLUDE)
All Entry (ALL)
Overwrite Existing Entries

Yous tin come back here at any fourth dimension and update/change these settings if needed.

If your host has the Advanced DNS Zone Editor available in cPanel in the Domains section/area y'all tin can get there and see that a TXT record for SPF is automatically added for your domain.

cPanel Advanced Editor

How To Disable DKIM And SPF In cPanel

To turn off/disable DKIM or SPF you tin return to E-mail Authentication and simply click on the Disable buttons.

Manually adding SPF

Information technology is as well possible to manually add together an SPF record by adding a TXT record using the Avant-garde DNS Zone Editor. (The Simple DNS Zone Editor won't let yous to add TXT records.)

Example:
Name: yourdomain.com.
TTL: 14400
Type: TXT
TXT Data: your bodily SPF record

And, click the Add Record button.

Add TXT Record

It will and then show up in the Zone File Records section at the bottom.

For those of y'all that want to explore manually calculation i you can check out the page beneath for help, just be careful and make certain yous know what you are doing.
Sender ID Framework SPF Record Magician by Microsoft

Testing – Results

When I send a message to Hotmail/Outlook from a domain before enabling DKIM or SPF I can check the message source headers and see that there are none, or they don't exist.

Hotmail No SPF

Hotmail No DKIM

After enabling both DKIM and SPF in cPanel, and waiting for propagation when I ship some other email to Hotmail/Outlook I can see they are present in the headers now.

Hotmail with SPF and DKIM

If I ship a message to a Gmail address from a domain with DKIM and SPF enabled and I check the message source headers I can come across that they say: pass, and the DKIM-Signature is nowadays.

Gmail with SPF and DKIM

Notation:
This would be for sending mail from your domain (e-mail address) with the cPanel webmail feature (horde, roundcube, or SquirrelMail), or with an email client program similar Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.

If you are using a PHP Script like WordPress to send out replies to comments for example, and you are using the default PHP mail function yous will want to check the email source headers for these as well. If you don't see DKIM keys and SPF laissez passer, then consider using an SMTP plugin instead of the PHP post function. Doing and so will allow WordPress to connect and transport postal service through your hosting SMTP (send mail transfer protocol) with DKIM keys, and SPF records attached.

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