Estimated time to read: 6 - 7 minutes

Before launching Actimo, your IT department will need to handle two simple setups. These will highly improve your open rate and the experience for your recipients.

a) Use your own domain to build trust

Actimo messages that are carried via SMS or email will feature a clickable link. By default, this link is called app.actimo.com. You can change the domain to your own domain.

What to do:

1. Decide on the domain name eg. yourcompany.com - we suggest that you choose a name as short as possible, since a text message can only contain up to 160 characters. The longer a name for your domain, the less characters will be left to write your message. If possible, use an international top-level domain eg. ".com" if you will be sending to several countries.

2. Your IT department needs to create the domain and point CNAME to lb1.actimo.com. Capital letters are not allowed in domain or subdomain.

3. Get in touch with your Customer Success Manager or support@actimo.com when step two is completed. We'll then make sure to connect it to your Actimo account.

4. Your Customer Success Manager or Support will also make sure to order an https certificate on your behalf.

b) Avoid spam filters by setting spf-record or DKIM

If you don't have a complete list of phone numbers for your recipients, you may need to send emails to some of them to get 100% reach. You may also want to send out an email newsletter via Actimo. In order to deliver emails with minimum risk of ending up in spam filters, your IT department has to create an spf record (or DKIM) to whitelist email sender. This will help emails get through firewalls and spam filters. If you do not setup an spf record, it could potentially decrease your delivery rate.

What to do:

1. Ask your IT department to create an spf record for spf.actimo.com. Make sure the setup is: include:spf.actimo.com.

2. If you are not going to use your own email address as sender, then ask IT to create a no-reply@yourcompany.com email address that you can use when sending emails from Actimo. You might prefer a 'no-reply', as you don't want hundreds of recipients to potentially reply directly to you.

3. Get in touch with your Customer Success Manager or support@actimo.com when handled. We'll test that it works correctly.

4. If your IT department would like to use DKIM instead of an spf-record, please have them reach out to your Customer Success Manager or Actimo Support to initiate the steps or ask questions.

Run DKIM setup

You will need to collaborate with a person from Actimo Support or in case of onboarding a person from Actimo Customer Success. Reach out to support@actimo.com when ready. We have shown the steps to follow below.

1. Decide on a hostname you wish to use as a reply to an email when sending from Actimo. The hostname is everything after @ in the email.

2. Make sure that you can alter the DNS settings for the hostname in question.

3. Reach out to Actimo Support with this information (hostname, and who to contact to send DNS changes).

4. Actimo's tech team will prepare the DNS and send an email to the contact you have provided with instructions on what you need to do with them.

5. Your contact makes the DNS changes and let us know when it has been done.

6. Actimo will validate the changes.

7. Actimo will change the email gateway from Sendgrid to SES (Amazon) and confirm that it is working by doing a few tests.

To pass the DKIM test it will show PASS on SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

Tags: Security, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DNS, settings, emails, server

Contact: support@actimo.com