Authenticating your domain indicates to your leads that your emails are genuine. It improves your domain reputation and increases the trust among your leads and mailbox providers.

Why should I authenticate my sender domain

Let's take a look at the various reasons as to why you should authenticate your domain.

• Improves your email deliverability.
  
• Prevents misuse of your domain.
  
• Increases the chances of your email to land directly in the inbox.
  
• Makes you an authentic email sender improving your reputation in the market.
  

What if I don't authenticate my sender domain

If you send emails from an unauthenticated domain, mailbox providers display to your contacts that your emails are from an unauthorized source. This is to warn your contacts that the email could be spam. Most mailbox providers view unauthenticated sender domains as suspicious, and differentiate them from authenticated senders to help their users avoid getting spoofed.

Gmail differentiates an unverified sender in the sender address part of an email with a "via", as shown in the image below. Here, zcsend.net is the sending source (Zoho Campaigns) and zylker.com is the actual email sender domain. Gmail has warned its users to avoid engaging with this email.

Zoho Mail also shows the sender domain that the email has been sent via.

In addition, Zoho Mail displays the original sender details in Sent by section of an email.

Zoho Mail also warns its users to be cautious while taking any actions in the email.

Similarly, Outlook shows "on behalf of" in the sender address part of an email.

To avoid this, authenticate your sender domain with Zoho Campaigns through SPF and DKIM.

How to authenticate your domain with Zoho Marketing Automation 

Zoho Marketing Automatio recommends authenticating your email domain before sending out newsletters to improve email deliverability.

What's next:

1. How to authenticate
   
2. How to setup SPF and DKIM TXT records in your DNS
   
3. Learn more about SPF , DKIM , DMARC