Send from your own domain

Your emails start out coming from a Postfjord address, like yourstudio [at] mail.postfjord.com, with replies going to your own address. With your own domain they come from an address like hello [at] mail.yourbusiness.com instead. People see your name in the address, and mail services such as Gmail learn to trust your domain on its own record.

Your own domain comes with every paid plan, once a workspace has email switched on. Only the workspace owner can add, change or remove it.

Pick the domain

Open Email settings at the top of Campaigns, and find Send from your own domain under the sender.

We suggest a subdomain: an extra word in front of your domain, like mail.yourbusiness.com. Two reasons:

1. Your newsletters build their own name with mail services. If some people mark a newsletter as spam, the email you write from your normal address is not hurt.
2. The records your website and your inbox use stay as they are. You only add new ones.

Your whole domain, like yourbusiness.com, works too.

Type the first part of the address, like hello or news, and the domain. Press Add domain. You cannot use a free email service such as Gmail or Outlook, because only the service itself can change its DNS.

Add the three records

Postfjord shows three records, all of the type CNAME. They tell mail services that Postfjord may send email for your domain. That is all a domain needs.

Postfjord looks up where your domain's DNS is kept. For Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace, Wix, Amazon Route 53, Porkbun, IONOS, Hostinger, one.com, Loopia and Oderland it shows that company's own steps, with a button that opens it. For any other company:

1. Open the website where you manage your domain. That is often where you bought it, or your web host.
2. Find the page called DNS, DNS records or DNS settings.
3. Add each record: pick the type CNAME, then copy the name and the value. Every field has a Copy button.
4. Come back and press Check.

Many DNS pages add your domain to the name by themselves. Enter only the short name shown under each name. If you see Name added twice after a check, that is what happened: delete the record and add it again with the short name.

On Cloudflare, switch the orange cloud off for each record, so it says DNS only.

Your DNS is at Cloudflare: let Postfjord add them

If your domain's DNS is at Cloudflare, Postfjord can add the records for you.

1. Open Let Postfjord add the records under the records.
2. In Cloudflare, go to API Tokens, press Create Token, and pick the template Edit zone DNS.
3. Under Zone Resources, pick the domain your emails come from. Press Continue to summary, then Create Token.
4. Copy the token, paste it in Postfjord and press Add the records.

The token can only change the DNS of that one domain. Postfjord uses it once and does not keep it, so you can delete it in Cloudflare when the domain is ready. Postfjord only adds records. If something else is already on a record's name, it leaves it alone and tells you which record to look at. You can do this ten times a day.

Someone else looks after your domain

Type their email under Someone else looks after your domain? and press Send the steps. They get the three records, the two optional ones, the steps for your DNS company and a link to this page, from Postfjord, with your sign-in email as the one who asked. You can send the steps five times a day, and once a day to the same address. The records stay the same if Amazon stopped looking, so the steps still work.

Extra: a bounce address on your domain

Under the three records you can open two more: an MX record and a TXT record on bounce.yourdomain. They are not needed to send. They put bounced emails on an address on your own domain, which gives mail services one more sign that it is you. Add them now or later; Postfjord sets them up by itself once it finds them, and your emails keep going out either way. The MX record has a priority: enter 10.

DMARC

Postfjord also shows a DMARC record if your domain has none. Gmail and Yahoo expect one. The one we suggest only says that DMARC is there and changes nothing about how your email is delivered.

Check

Records can take a few minutes, or up to a day, to show up. Press Check to look at once. Next to each record you see Found, Not found yet, or what is wrong with it.

You do not need to keep pressing. Postfjord checks by itself every 30 minutes for three days, then once a day, and emails you when the domain is ready. From then on your campaigns, automations and test emails come from your own address.

If the records are still missing a day after you added the domain, the owner gets an email that says what we see, like how many of the three we found and if a name got the domain twice. A second one comes after two days.

Amazon, who sends our email, looks for the three records for three days. If it gives up, the domain shows Not found. You keep the same records. Add them, and Postfjord asks Amazon to look again by itself once it finds all three. Press Check to ask at once.

If Amazon cannot find the two extra records, the domain still sends. The extra shows what is missing: fix it and press Check.

A domain that is still not ready 30 days after you first added it is removed by itself, so nobody can hold on to a domain they never set up. Removing it and adding it again does not start the 30 days over. After it is removed, you can add it again one week later. You get new records to add.

If it stops working

Postfjord checks a ready domain every six hours. If a record disappears, for example after a move to a new web host, your emails go out from the Postfjord address again from the next check, with replies still going to you. If Amazon refuses your address before that, the email goes from the Postfjord address at once. Nothing is lost and nothing stops. The owner gets an email, and the domain shows Not working with the record that is missing. Put it back and press Check.

Confirmation emails

The email people get when they sign up, with the button to confirm, always comes from your Postfjord address, like yourstudio-confirm [at] mail.postfjord.com. It carries your sender name, company name and postal address like every other email. It keeps working while your domain is being set up, and if the domain ever stops working.

Change the address or remove the domain

Press Change address to use another first part, like news instead of hello. The domain and its records stay the same.

Press Remove domain to go back to the Postfjord address. After that you can delete its records from your DNS. To use the domain again later, add it again: you get new records.

FAQ