Set Up Enhanced Email Delivery

Enhanced Delivery sends your Advanced Billing emails from a domain you own rather than a generic Maxio address, with full SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication behind them. Mailboxes at Google and Yahoo now enforce those standards for bulk senders, so authenticating your own domain is what keeps receipts, renewal reminders, and dunning notices out of spam folders. Maxio sends through its own Mailgun account, so you don't need a Mailgun account of your own, but your domain administrator does need to add several DNS records.

WARNING: Set this up with your IT representative. A misconfigured DNS record can stop your email sending entirely. Configure and confirm it on a test site before applying it to your live site.

Before you start

Enhanced Delivery is self-service and carries no additional cost. Viewing your domain's setup status requires the account permission described as manages product catalog, settings, and integrations. Registering or changing your domain, and verifying its DNS records, both require Admin access.

What Enhanced Delivery changes

Advanced Billing sends only from the sending subdomain you designate, such as maxio.example.net. Every other email service on your domain keeps working exactly as it did.

Google and Yahoo publish their own sender requirements, which explain why authentication matters for deliverability. See Mailgun's summary of the 2024 Gmail and Yahoo inbox updates.

Register your sending domain

Everything else depends on this step. Mailgun only generates your DNS records once the domain is registered, so there is nothing to add to your DNS until you've done this.

To register your sending domain

1. Go to Tools > Email Insights and open the Setup Info tab.
2. Find the Mailgun setup card.
3. Choose your domain:
   • If your organization has already connected a domain to Maxio, select it under Connect an existing one.
   • Otherwise, enter a new one under Create a new domain, in the form mail.yourdomain.com.
4. Click Save.

You can point Advanced Billing at a different domain later by returning to the same card and clicking Change domain. There's no self-service way to remove a domain entirely. Contact Maxio Support if you need one deleted.

Add the DNS records

Once the domain is registered, the Mailgun DNS Entries Required section lists the exact records to create, with the real values for your domain, including your own DKIM key. Work from that table rather than from an example, and give it to whoever administers your DNS.

The table has four columns: Name, Record Type, Enabled, and Value. The Enabled column marks each record individually as valid or not, so you can see exactly which one is wrong instead of only that something is.

An example of the DNS records table

Important: Take the actual names and values from the table on your own site, not from the example below. Your DKIM key is unique to your domain, and the exact record names Mailgun issues can differ.

If you register a subdomain, such as mail.yourdomain.com, the table still shows names relative to that subdomain in the same shape as above. If you're setting that subdomain up underneath a domain you already use for other email, configure the records under the subdomain instead of the root: for a subdomain named sub, use sub instead of @ and k1._domainkey.sub instead of k1._domainkey.

Verify the domain

While the domain is unverified it can't send mail, and the page says so directly.

After your DNS records are in place, click Check DNS Records Now. DNS changes can take 24 to 48 hours to propagate, so a check that fails immediately afterward doesn't necessarily mean the records are wrong. If the domain stays unverified after that window, compare each record's name and value against the table and check the Enabled column to find which one isn't resolving.

When Mailgun confirms the records, the domain becomes active and Advanced Billing starts sending through it.

The same Setup Info page also reports SPF and DMARC check results for your domain. SPF can show a pass, warning, or failure marker; DMARC only ever shows a pass or a warning, since a missing DMARC record is treated as a warning, not a failure. Read these first when something isn't working, since they name the specific problem.

Confirm the sender address

The Setup Info page lists the addresses your email is sent from, under Your emails are set to come from. There can be more than one, and each links to the screen where you change it:

• Default, set in your Site Settings.
• Dunning Default, set in your Dunning Settings.
• A per-template address, set on the individual email template.

Changing the default doesn't change a template that has its own address, so check this list rather than assuming a single setting governs everything. Dunning emails are the one exception: they always use the Dunning Default, even if the dunning template itself has its own From address set. See the Configure Emails help article for how to set these values.

Test your setup

Once the domain is active, send yourself a real email from a test site to confirm the whole path works end to end. See the Preview Emails with Test Data help article.

Related information

To check whether a specific message was delivered, see Review Email Archives.

To brand the messages sent from your own domain, see Build HTML Email Layouts.