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Advanced Deliverability - Lesson 3
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Authentication and Technical Setup: Building Trust Through Technology
Email authentication might sound like a technical topic best left to IT departments, but understanding how it works gives you a significant advantage in cold outreach. Authentication protocols exist to verify that emails actually come from the domains they claim to come from. When your authentication is properly configured, email providers trust your messages more. When it is misconfigured or missing, your deliverability suffers.
The Three Pillars of Email Authentication
Email authentication rests on three main protocols: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Each serves a distinct purpose, and together they create a comprehensive system for verifying email legitimacy.
SPF, which stands for Sender Policy Framework, tells receiving servers which IP addresses are authorized to send email on behalf of your domain. When you configure SPF, you are essentially publishing a list of approved senders. Receiving servers check incoming emails against this list to verify they come from authorized sources.
DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, adds a digital signature to your emails. This signature is verified using a public key published in your domain's DNS records. DKIM confirms that the email content has not been altered in transit and that it genuinely originated from your domain.
DMARC builds on SPF and DKIM by defining what should happen when authentication fails. It also enables reporting, so you can see when someone attempts to send unauthorized email using your domain. DMARC policies can be set to monitor, quarantine, or reject unauthenticated messages.
Why Proper Configuration Matters
Many cold outreach practitioners set up authentication quickly and assume everything is working correctly. This assumption can be costly. Misconfigured authentication often passes basic checks but fails under scrutiny from sophisticated email providers.
For example, SPF records have a limit on the number of DNS lookups they can trigger. Exceeding this limit causes SPF validation to fail, even if all your sending services are listed correctly. Similarly, DKIM signing can fail if your email service provider's configuration does not match your DNS records exactly.
Taking the time to verify that your authentication is working correctly pays dividends in deliverability. Tools exist to test your configuration and identify potential issues before they impact your campaigns.
Custom Tracking Domains
Beyond the core authentication protocols, custom tracking domains play an important role in cold outreach deliverability. When you include links in your emails, those links typically route through a tracking server that records clicks before redirecting to the final destination.
Using Instantly.ai's default tracking domain means your links share reputation with every other user of the platform. Setting up a custom tracking domain isolates your link reputation, so your performance is not impacted by other senders.
Custom tracking domains should be warmed up just like sending domains. A brand new tracking domain with no history can trigger spam filters, even if your sending domain has excellent reputation. Gradually introducing tracked links in your campaigns helps build positive association with your tracking domain.
DNS Management Best Practices
All of these authentication mechanisms rely on DNS records. Managing your DNS carefully ensures that your authentication remains valid as your infrastructure evolves.
Keep records of every DNS change you make. When adding new sending services, verify that your SPF and DKIM records are updated accordingly. Periodically audit your DNS to remove records for services you no longer use.
DNS propagation can take time. When making changes, allow twenty-four to forty-eight hours before testing to ensure records have propagated globally. Making hasty changes and immediately testing often leads to confusing results.
The Technical Foundation for Scale
Proper technical setup becomes increasingly important as you scale your cold outreach operation. A single misconfigured domain might have minimal impact, but when you are managing dozens of domains and hundreds of inboxes, small issues compound quickly.
Building good technical habits early in your cold outreach journey saves significant headaches later. Document your setup processes, use consistent naming conventions, and verify configuration before sending any campaigns. The time invested in getting the technical foundation right pays returns in reliable deliverability across your entire operation.
Video transcript
Let's talk about one of the easiest ways to run your deliverability, sending too many emails to the same company. If you're hitting five, ten or twenty people at the same company in a short window, that is a huge red flag to spam fields and secure email gateways. That's why Instantly enforces company send limits, basically guardrails for your sending behavior. By default, Instantly limits how many messages your workspace can send to the same company in a given time frame.
But you can adjust these depending on your audience. For enterprise prospects, you might want to keep it really low, maybe one or two messages per week. For SMB lists, can relax it a bit. The key idea here is controlled exposure.
You want your messages to look natural and well paced, not like a flood from ten different inboxes hitting the same domain at once. And the best part, this isn't just about compliance, it's about reputation longevity. These limits make sure your sender footprint looks healthy to Google, Outlook and every SEG in between.
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