Available on: Business plans
By default, all emails from Formspree are sent from an email ending in @formspree.io. If you want to make your emails more recognizable and consistent with your brand, you can send emails using your own domain. Submission notifications and autoresponses will be sent from your domain, but important account notices will continue to be sent to the account owner using Formspree's domain.
Step 1: Adding your domain
Navigate to your account's domain settings in the dashboard and add the domain that you want to send emails from. Custom domain emails are sent using SendGrid, a leader in email delivery. If your domain already has domain keys set up using SendGrid, consider using a unique subdomain (e.g. forms.example.com)
Step 2: Verifying your domain
To verify the domain, you must edit your Domain Name System (DNS) records in the Formspree dashboard. You can view the appropriate records by clicking the domain you just added. DNS record validation is needed so that we can ensure that you own the domain and provide our highest guarantees of deliverability.
Depending on your DNS provider, the process for adding DNS records varies. If you aren't sure who manages your DNS, please contact your organization's domain administrator.
We have compiled a few common DNS providers below:
- Amazon Web Services
- Cloudflare (turn off the orange cloud icon)
- DNSimple
- DreamHost
- Dyn
- Google Domains
- GoDaddy
- Hostgator
- Namecheap
Formspree uses best practices to authenticate email domains and ensure the highest level of deliverability. However, you will ultimately be responsible for ensuring that your domain maintains it's reputation.
What does this actually do?
This section explains what these CNAME records are doing and why they're important. You can skip to the next step if you just want to set up your domain.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) allow a mail server to verify a cryptographic signature associated with your domain and detect malicious emails. Email has no inherent authentication mechanism, so it is often spoofed for phishing purposes. By relying on public key cryptography, a mail server is able to validate that Formspree servers are allowed to actually send email on your behalf.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is another layer of authentication that ensures that mail coming from a domain is submitted by an IP address authorized by that domain. A mail server will look at your Formspree maintains dedicated IPs to ensure that your email delivery is not affected by other spammers on the Internet.
This has a huge impact on your deliverability. By letting a mail server know that it is actually the domain owner sending increases the trust the server can have that the message is authentic and can be delivered to the recipient's inbox.
Formspree will set 3 CNAME records that handle the signing of DKIM and your SPF authentication. When you add these records to your DNS, you are ensuring that mail servers know that Formspree is trusted to send email on behalf of your domain. When you set these CNAME records, Formspree will automatically update the records when we need to make changes to the DKIM or SPF information.
Step 3: Setting your sending domain
From the main dashboard, visit your project settings. If the domain has been verified, you are now able to select the verified domain from the dropdown. Keep in mind that all forms in the project will use this domain for submission notifications and autoresponses.
You can always send customer emails via formspree.io. If you want to remove your domain, change all your projects to send with the formspree.io domain. Once you delete the domain from your account settings, you can remove the unused DNS records from your DNS provider.
Troubleshooting
If your domain hasn't verified after 48 hours, try the following:
- Check for any typos. When you click Verify, we will provide you a list of issues we encountered trying to verify the records.
- Ensure that you don't have duplicate domain names. This may happen if you have your own SendGrid account to send out emails. If this is the case, we advise you to use a subdomain (for example forms.example.com instead of example.com).
- Ensure that the added records do not include your domain twice. Some DNS services automatically append your domain name to the DNS records. For example, we may ask you to add the record s1._domainkey.example.com but you only need to add s1._domainkey to your DNS records
- Ensure that your DNS records are published. If you aren't sure, you can use a free online lookup tool to verify if the records have been published.
If you still aren't able to verify the domain, please contact your DNS provider.