Introduction
This article describes the process of authenticating your domain within the Perfect Gym system. Domain authentication, which uses a security standard called DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), is a crucial step for ensuring your emails are delivered successfully. It acts as a digital signature, proving to recipient email services (like Gmail, Outlook, etc.) that messages sent from Perfect Gym using your domain are legitimate. This improves your deliverability, helps prevent your emails from being marked as spam, and protects your brand's reputation.
- This article explains how to set up your domain for sending emails, what DKIM keys are, and where to configure them.
- This article will be helpful for System Administrators, IT departments, and PG Champions.
Before you start
Before beginning the process, please identify the exact domain you wish to use for sending emails from Perfect Gym (e.g., yourclub.com). You should also know who in your organization is responsible for managing your domain's DNS records (e.g., your IT department or an external web provider), as you will need their direct involvement to complete these steps.
Instructions
Authenticating your domain is a collaborative process between you and the Perfect Gym team. Please follow the steps below.
- First provide Perfect Gym with the domain that you would like to authenticate in our system for sending automated emails and newsletters.
- Our team will then create an identity for your domain in our email service and generate the domain keys and give them to you (best practice is to deliver this in an encrypted file).
- Log in to your domain name system (DNS) and find the CNAME record.
- Copy and paste the 3 pairs of DKIM keys you were given (step 2 here), into the CNAME record.
- Wait for your domain provider to confirm that the record is updated – you can also ask your Perfect Gym representative to check this – but please be aware that it can take up to 72 hours.
- This should be completed within 72 hours or less – if you are not able to complete the update of your DNS in this time, then please inform your Perfect Gym representative, as we may need to restart the process on our side.
Hints
If you have a person or a service that administers your email/domain (e.g. an internal IT specialist or perhaps your domain is registered by your website provider), they will be the best people to help you with this on your side. You will be able to find useful information regarding updating the CNAME record in your DNS on your domain provider's online help pages.
More information about DKIM authentication can be found here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channels-email-manage-verify.html#channels-email-manage-verify-domain (refer to section "Verifying a domain", point number 8. which is the point where we hand over the CNAME records for the client to input into their DNS - everything prior to this was handled on PG side)