Email Sender Authentication: Setting up DKIM

Andrew

Updated 26 February 2023 21:33

The following instructions will help you set up DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) on a domain of your choice for emails sent via the platform from an address nominated by you, (such as pay slip notifications, leave or expense requests, report packs). This is to ensure that mail servers that receive these emails don’t think we are trying to spoof your emails because we are pretending to be you, and so won’t put the emails in the recipient’s Spam/Junk folders. Eg. if the domain for your company was mybusiness.com.au, and we sent pay slip notifications to your employees with a From Address of payman@mybusiness.com.au, receiving mail servers will not believe that the incoming emails were from you as they can easily see that they were from us, and so will mark the emails as spam. To avoid this issue we can sign the emails with DKIM.

A short video on this setup can be found here.

Setting up DKIM Email Authentication requires you to make changes in your Payroll settings and your DNS host.

Instructions on how to set up DKIM authentication

To set up DKIM authentication:

Go to Payroll settings -> Email Sender Authentication.
Click on the Add button (or follow the 'add a new DKIM authentication now?' link)
Enter in the domain you wish to authenticate.
Click Register
The system should generate a set of CNAME records that you will need to add to your DNS settings. You'll need to contact your IT dept or web admin for further assistance on adding these records if required.
Add the DNS records to your DNS registry - This happens within your DNS host settings. You'll need to contact your IT dept or web admin for further assistance if required.
Once you've done that, come back to Payroll settings -> Email Sender Authentication, click the Unvalidated button for your domain.
If you've created the records correctly, the domain will be Validated.

Once your domain has been Validated, any email we send for you on your behalf that uses that domain as the From Address will be signed with DKIM, and will have a very good chance of being delivered to recipient's Inboxes.

N.B. In order to set up DKIM authentication, you need access to the domain's DNS settings. For this reason, you are not able to follow this process for restricted email domains (e.g. Yahoo, Gmail) because in those cases, you don't have access to the DNS settings.

Making this change at a brand level

You are able to make this change at a brand level, which will apply to all businesses under the brand.

Go to brand management section from within the partner dashboard -> Email Sender Authentication.
Click on the 'add a new DKIM authentication now?' link:
Enter in the domain you wish to authenticate.
Click Register
The system should generate a set of CNAME records that you will need to add to your DNS settings. You'll need to contact your IT dept or web admin for further assistance on adding these records if required.
Add the DNS records to your DNS registry - This happens within your DNS host settings. You'll need to contact your IT dept or web admin for further assistance if required.
Once you've done that, come back to Brand management -> Email sender authentication, click the 'unvalidate' button for your domain.
If you've created the records correctly, the domain will be Validated.

Setting up DKIM Email Authentication requires you to make changes in your Payroll settings and your DNS host.

If you are having issues with validation, you may need to remove the “.mybusiness.com” on the host values and try again.

If you have any questions you can contact us via support@yourpayroll.com.au