Transcription
Hi, my name is Max, and in this video, I'll be showing you how to ensure that your emails do not go into the client spam folder and instead end up in the important folder.
Before we jump straight into the video, if you need help with your Zoho project, whether that's Zoho Mail or any other Zoho application, I have a Fiverr gig where I help people like you, business owners, and business professionals get Zoho streamlined and fully optimized for their business. So, feel free to check that out. I'll leave the link in the description. And with that said, let's get started straight away.
Uh, into the video. So, the things that I've got open on my tab, and it'd be worth you following along with this, let's make my face a bit smaller, is I've got open obviously my Zoho Mail. So, if you've not signed up for a Zoho Mail account, I'm not going to teach you to suck eggs, obviously. Sign up for a Zoho Mail account and log in for the first time. Or, if you've already got a Zoho Mail account, you'll obviously look a bit more like this, but the process is essentially the same.
Also, next, you're going to need to open your DNS management for the domain that you want to add to Zoho. So, if you've got a new domain wherever it's hosted, so in my example, it's GoDaddy, but wherever your domain is hosted, go to the DNS management settings for your domain. Every single domain host will have this option, so it's just go and find it. To begin with, have the two different pages open.
Next, we're going to go back into Zoho Mail and open the admin dashboard. If you're logging in for the first time, you will already be on the admin dashboard. So, we can do that by going, clicking on our picture here, going to Admin Console. As I was saying, if it's the first time you're setting up a domain and registering with, um, Zoho Mail, then you'll probably be put into this process straight away. But if not, we're going to be going to Domains, adding on our new domain.
And we're going to be following the steps to map the DNS details that we need to to validate with Zoho Mail. Now, there's two ways to do this. If your domain host is actually a supported domain host with Zoho, it will allow you to log in through your through your domain host to automatically assign the records that you require into your DNS. Or, you have another option, which is what I'm going to be going through, is to configure the records manually. So, I'm going to configure the records manually, but feel free to try this, which will skip a few steps. However, for me covering this as a tutorial, I'm going to try and cover every base, which will be configuring the records manually.
So, let's start with that. And what Zoho is saying here on this first page is that we need to add a TXT record into GoDaddy with this value. So, it's dead straightforward to do this, and it's saying that our hostname is going to be blank or app. So, let's go into our DNS management, add a new record.
TXT. And let's copy these details and paste them in. Save. So, that's done now. Now, one thing to note is, if it's your first time dealing with DNS, it does take a period of time for your records that have been added to display everywhere and get recognized by Zoho inside of the the admin console. So, it can take a few minutes, all the way up to an hour, or even 24 hours sometimes for the for the changes to take place. Usually though, in my experience, it just takes a few minutes, if that. And that seems to have validated. Yeah, so we've validated now. We've verified that we own that domain. Res own. So, let's go to the next steps. Proceed.
Now, we're actually going to be mapping our DNS. And again, it gives us an option to log into our DNS to do this, but I'm going to configure them manually. Cool. And the next step is that we've just got to add all these records into our DNS. So, MX records. These are responsible for actually handling the emails sending from that domain. SPF record is something I'll talk about in a little bit more detail in a second. Then also our DKIM. We need to go in as well. So, these are just all about allowing Zoho to send with our domain and validating that we actually own this domain and Zoho is authorized to send on our behalf.
So, let's start with these three MX records. So, it's all the record types, MX. It's all at the root domain, so at, at, at. And then it's these three different values. So, add record MX at. Copy, paste. And then we're going to take the priority from here and put it into our DNS as well. So, that's the first one. Let's add the next one. MX at the root domain. The next priority is 20, and the value is this. Cool. And then let's do our final one for the MX, anyway. Add new record. Record types, MX. Got the root domain. Priority this time is 50, and we'll copy the corresponding value. Save.
So, we've now got our three MX records added, which is these top three. Now, let's add in our SPF record. One thing to note on this, and this is very important, if you already have an SPF record, you can add two. So, you'll need to merge your SPF values into the same value, and I'll show you how you do that in a second. So, let me just add this in. So, add new record. Record type is text. Set the root domain again, so at or left blank. Then we're going to add our value. SPF. And then we're going to click save.
If you already have, let me just save this. If you already have an SPF record, in this case, I don't, it's a brand new domain. If you already have an SPF record, you will need to do the following. So, let's imagine that this was different. So, we had an SPF that already existed, but this was different. All we would do is take this bit from Zoho, this last bit, edit this, and paste it onto the end. So, then it will say SPF include Zoho Mail. Include. Well, it'd do the other way around, actually. So, it'll be SPF include, let's say, Mailchimp.com, and then also include Zoho Mail. And you can carry on doing that for as many SPF records that you want. But make sure you do not put more than one SPF record as individual, individual records in your DNS. It needs to only one SPF can exist. That's what I'm trying to get at. So, let's cancel that, as I've only got one. That's that's fine.
Then, let's go back to our DNS setup. So, the next record we need to put in is DKIM. DKIM record, and it's a record type text again, but this time our hostname is not at the root. We've got to add in this little bit of information, and then this big long string of information here. So, let's go into DNS again. Add new record. Text. This time, it's not at. We're going to be adding in our hostname, and then our value. Then save.
Cool. So, now we've added in all of our DNS records. As I was saying before, it may take a few minutes, up to a couple of hours, for this to show that it's been done. However, in my experience, it's pretty quick. So, I'm going to wait a minute or two, and then I'll give it a try. Let's try it now, actually, just in case.
Cool. So, you can see now that our Voice Space Date domain has now been added to our Zoho Mail. Now, even though we feel like we have completed the process here, there's one more step that we will need to do to ensure that it's fully validated, but we can only do that once we've actually set up an email address for the first time. So, before we go and do this final step, and there's a few steps actually, just to make sure it's 100% validated, we need to go and add an email address for our user account so that we can send emails with this domain. So, Users. This is my user account. Mailbox settings. And I'm going to give myself a new email alias with this domain.
Cool. So, that should work now. And the way we test that is just go back to our Zoho Mail. Give this a refresh. New mail. And we should be able to access our Pier. A new email. Okay, so that's done, but we're not actually finished yet with the validation. There's another step that we need to take in the admin console. So, let's go back to Admin. Then go to Domains. Go to our Voice, well, our new domain in my case, it's Voice Space Date. Then we're going to be going to our Email Configuration here. And what we need to do is add in a DMARC record. So, this is probably the issue that a lot of you are facing in terms of actually getting your emails bouncing. So, make sure you're adding in a DMARC record.
But the reason why we had to add in an email address first is we need to add in these fields here for a notification email address. So, Asos. Policy percentage, you can actually leave this blank, and it will set itself, which might be the best option. Action to be taken when DMARC verification fails, do nothing with the email. You probably want this to be, you can leave it to do nothing. We'll do some testing in a minute and see how it affects the deliverability. Then alignment for SPF, relaxed. Alignment for DKIM, relaxed. Okay, so let's generate this record. Notice now we've got an additional DNS record that's been generated that needs to be added to our DNS. So, let's do that. So, new record. It's a TXT record. It gives us our hostname here, then it gives us our value at the end. Now, we can adjust this slightly. And the more strict your policy is for DMARC, generally the better delivery rates you will get. I've set it to quite relaxed to begin with, but you can play around with that in terms of making it stricter to increase deliverability. So, let's save that. And again, it may take a few seconds for this to update. We'll give it a try now. Yeah, still waiting. So, let's just give it a few minutes, and then I'll come back to you once it's validated.
Okay, that's our DMARC record and validated. And now what we're going to be doing is testing our deliverability rate of the email that we set up. So, a good website to do this with is called Mail Tester. No, it's not. And I'll tell you which is, and it's this one. So, mail-tester.com. So, come to this website, mail-tester.com, and then what we're going to do is we're going to send an email to this email address, obviously using our new address from the new domain. So, to add in the address from Mail Tester. Then just add in some example details. So, this.
Cool. Then click Send. And we're going to test this here by clicking, then check your score. And you can see now it's received the email. Mail Tester has given us a score. Now, with our setup, we've scored 10 out of 10, which means we're very, very, very, very, very unlikely to be landing in the spam. So, that was the way to set up mail with Zoho Mail for the first time to ensure that you're not ever going to be landed in the spam. It's pretty straightforward, but I think the step that a lot of people miss is either they've configured their SPF records wrong, where they have two or more SPF records when they should be in one DNS record, or they're not configuring the DMARC record. So, those are the two points to make sure you completely do that. Mail Tester, like I was saying, is a good tool just to be confident that you're authenticated and you're doing everything that you can. So, yeah, that's the that's the video. As discussed at the start of this video, if you need help with Zoho for your business, I'm available on Fiverr to be hired. I'll add the link below in the description. And besides that, um, feel free to comment with any questions, and I'll speak to you in a bit. Thank you. Bye-bye.