This is a repost from my old NetSuiteGuy.com blog.
DKIM stands for Domain Key Identified Mail. Check out the wiki here. Essentially it is a way for you to digitally “sign” your campaign emails and then be authenticated by the recieving email systems. Doing this will improve the delivery rate, and therefore your response rate, of your email campaigns no matter the volume of email you send.
NetSuite also has a rule that if you send more than 10,000 emails in a month you must have DKIM set up. We started getting error messages before this cap. This prevented us from sending emails until it got fixed. Needless to say, it’s important to turn this on well before you get into trouble.
So, if you are implementing NetSuite, just turn it on in the beginning and be done with it.
Now, if you go read the help files in NetSuite on DKIM you might end up being confused. Hopefully they’ve been fixed by the time you read this.
First things First
What you need to do is to go to Setup, Company, Printing, Fax & Email Preferences
Now go to the email tab. Look under Domain Keys.
The only thing that you do that is different than the help file is to put in the “Domain Name”. That’s your domain name probably that you use for your company. Example “audaxium.com” no www.
If you look up the screen a bit you’ll see “default mail merge domain” don’t touch that!
Now you’ve read this far. Don’t click the check box and set up DKIM yet.
When we set it up, maybe it was just us, but when our emails went out they began using a “mail merge domain” that completely messed up all links in our emails. So… in hindsight, we should of set the mail merge domains first even though supposedly they have nothing to do with DKIM.
The benefit of setting up the mail merge domain is that it replaces the “forms.netsuite.com” or “www.netsuite.com” in the links and uses your domain. It’s more professional and possibly helps delivery rates.
With me?
So your steps should be:
- Setup your subdomain if you haven’t already at Setup, Website, Domains
- It should be “hosted as” Email Campaign
- Go to Setup, Company, Printing Fax & Email, Email Tab
- Select the subdomain for your “default mail merge domain”
- example campaign.audaxium.com
- Create a cname record on your DNS record that redirects “campaign” to shopping.netsuite.com
- Validate that it’s working
- open a command prompt and type nslookup campaign.yourdomain.com
- It should return shopping.netsuite.com as a non-authoritive answer with the proper alias
- Send a Test email campaign, making sure the links all work
- Take a deep breath
- Follow the help guide on DKIM using the defaults except for the subdomain
- Talk to your IT guy and get him to set up the txt record with the “dns entry”
- remember the txt name is “selector1._domainkey”
- After a few hours click the validate button
- Then, and only then, turn on the DKIM checkbox
A couple of tips. You can’t figure it out using only the first DKIM help file. Follow the godaddy instructions even if you don’t use godaddy to host your dns record. It’ll explain how to set up the text record a bit more clearly.
I guess the key message is to validate that the bits are working along the way before turning them on.
If one person finds this helpful that’s great, please leave me a comment.