Introduction
The Campaigns: Create branded emails feature requires setting up a new subdomain to send emails from, and new DNS entries to ensure that the new subdomain can be seen by other systems and send emails correctly. This article describes how to verify that your subdomain DNS records are correctly set up. If you need assistance making changes to your DNS settings or troubleshooting changes that you are unable to verify, please contact your DNS provider or other IT resources for assistance. Because of the number of DNS providers used and the potential complexity of existing DNS setups, Gem is not able to provide specific instructions for how to make changes in your DNS provider’s settings.
Enabling Campaigns and Initial Set Up
If your team does not have Gem Campaigns enabled, contact your Customer Success Manager to get started. If possible, please include the subdomain that you would like to use for sending campaign emails. We recommend using something easily identifiable; for example, if your normal emails are from domain.com, consider using recruiting.domain.com as the subdomain for your campaigns.
Once you have provided a subdomain to Gem, you will receive instructions from us with the specific DNS records you will need to set up. There will be 5 records in total - two TXT records, two MX records, and one CNAME record. This is an example of what those records will look like:
Example DNS Records for subdomain recruitingdemo.gem.com
NOTE: These values are examples only. DO NOT use these values for setting up your own Campaigns DNS entries. Make sure to use the specific values you receive from Gem.
If you need assistance setting up these DNS records, please consult your DNS provider.
Additionally, please note that we do not support SPF macros for our DNS records.
Verifying DNS Records
Before the Campaigns feature will be available for your team, Gem will verify that the DNS records for your subdomain have been created, are available publicly, and match the values specified. If they are not, you will not be able to use the Campaigns feature until this is resolved. You should also verify these yourself. If you are familiar with using command line tools like dig or nslookup for viewing DNS results, please feel free to use those tools to verify the records. If not, we recommend using a web tool such as whatsmydns.net to confirm that the records are available.
To use whatsmydns.net, make sure you have a copy of the record values you would like to verify, then open whatsmydns.net in your web browser. For each record, type or paste the hostname value into the search box, and then select the appropriate TYPE value from the dropdown box. Once both are entered, click the ‘Search’ button to query those records. If everything is working, you should see most of the locations listed show a green check mark, followed by the Value specified for the DNS records you are verifying. If you see all red Xs, or if you see green checkmarks with a different value, then the record is not set up correctly. Please consult your DNS provider for assistance in this case.
Using our example values from above, here is what a valid result for the first TXT record looks like. Note that some locations have been omitted to keep the example straightforward; you will see a longer list in your test.
For each location, a green checkmark is shown and the value matches that in the table above.
This test should be repeated for each DNS record in the list, specifying the hostname from the table and confirming that the value matches exactly. If any of the tests do not return valid results, please correct your DNS settings and try again.
Please refer to the following guides for common DNS setup instructions:
Have any issues or questions on this topic? Please feel free to contact your dedicated Gem Customer Success Manager directly or our Support team at support@gem.com.