To send emails from Engage, you must create a verified sender first. Happily, they're quick to make and easy to manage.
Creating a verified domain is a little more complex and requires direct input from your IT team; we strongly recommend it to maximize your email deliverability rates - particularly if you're interested in emailing current students.
Verified Senders
When emailing students from Gecko, verified senders allow you to control which email address and sender name it'll look like your emails are coming from (spoofing).
Go to Settings > Verified Senders & Domains to get started, and click + New Sender in the top-right corner.
Add the name of the sender and their email address and click Save. Doing so will create the send and trigger an email from AWS (Amazon Web Services) confirming that this is a legitimate attempt to spoof your email address in Gecko.
Click the link in the AWS email. Doing so will redirect you to Gecko, where you'll be asked to log in. After you've logged in, your sender will be instantly verified, and you can start emailing immediately.
Despite the quickness of creating individual senders, we strongly recommend you create a verified domain. Once verified, domains massively increase your email deliverability (particularly to current students on your same domain) and allow you to instantly create any sender without needing AWS authentication emails.
Verified Domains
🚨 Owing to regulatory changes in Feb 2024, mass emails sent from Gecko Engage require additional setup to succeed. Be sure to read our email-sending requirements guide.
Verifying your domain will require input from your IT and CMS/web teams. Despite this, there's a tremendous upside to verifying your domain in Gecko. Emails are far more likely to land in students' inboxes, and you can create and verify senders instantly.
To begin, head to Settings > Verified Senders & Domains > Domains and click + New Domain in the top-right corner.
Enter your domain name (this is likely the suffix of your email address without the @ sign) and click Save.
Verify this domain belongs to you. This can be done via a Gecko Form Embed on a webpage on your domain or a unique Meta Tag in the page <head> tags of a webpage on your domain. Once the form or meta tag is in place, return to your domain and click Verify Embedded Form/Tag.
Once verified, you will be taken to a page that lists configuration details that should be added to your domain's DNS settings. Copy the configuration details in full and send them to your IT team (and share this helpful guide!), asking them to add the provided records into your DNS settings. While the Domain Verification record is the only required field to verify your domain, we strongly recommend including the DKIM, SPF, and Mail From verification records to boost email deliverability.
Once your IT team has updated the DNS records, wait ~24 hours before returning to the domain on Gecko and clicking Refresh Statuses. If the records have been successfully updated, your verification status will be updated to show Verified across the board:
Congratulations! Any senders you create with your domain suffix will be verified immediately.
Updating DNS records
This section serves as a reference point for IT teams tasked with updating DNS records.
You'll be asked to pick a type when adding new DNS records. This corresponds to the Type included in the configuration details your colleague sent you:
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You may be required to modify the values slightly when configuring them within your domain management service. In the example above, GoDaddy prompted an error when the exact host value ("gecko.adriantusk.com") was copied and pasted, whilst this was not an issue on AWS.
Each provider will work slightly differently, so you may be required to shift some of the details to fit their form. We also had to place the priority into a specific input field on GoDaddy instead of including it before the value.
Any questions? Start a live chat with a support team member, or feel free to explore the rest of our academy. Spotted an error or want to suggest a future article for the academy? Let us know here.