Preparing Your Domain to Send Emails

Overview

This article outlines how to prepare your domain to ensure you have the best deliverability of your emails.

Deliverability

Deliverability of your messages is one of Bullhorn Automation's most important responsibilities. We will help you to stay compliant, suggest best practices and have security features built into the system to help maintain a great sending reputation. 

There are some technical steps you should take to help get as many messages into the inbox as possible. No matter which approach you send, all messages will appear to be sent from your domain. When a contact responds, those responses will come back to whoever they were sent from.

Adding to the Allow List

You'll need assistance from your IT team to allow a new sub-domain. It's a straightforward process and ensures the highest deliverability. 

By adding your domain to the allow list, you will start to build your domain’s email reputation and explicitly show all your recipients that you actually sent these emails. This should help increase your deliverability rates and reduce your potential for spam reports.

The steps for the process are as follows:

  1. Bullhorn Automation or your Implementation Partner will send you an email with all of the information you'll add to your domain. Also found under the Website Integration tab. You must be a Bullhorn Automation admin to view.
  2. Forward that information to your IT team or add them on your own.
  3. You or your IT team will then add four new CNAMEs to your domain's DNS Records. If you need help, you can run the following search in Google, then add the name of your hosting provider. 
  4. Once complete, confirm with your Implementation partner or send an email to automationsupport@bullhorn.com and Bullhorn Automation will complete the process.

Updating your DMARC Records

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) makes it easier for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to prevent malicious email practices, such as domain spoofing. See this article for more information.

This allows for email senders to specify how to handle emails that aren’t authenticated using SPF of DKIM. Follow the steps below to update your DMARC records: 

The following steps are general, and may not apply to your specific domain host. If you need further clarity or assistance with the steps below, contact your domain registrar support.

  1. Log into the administrative section of your domain.
  2. Locate the DNS Records update section in the admin tool.
    • If your configuration already has a value for _dmarc.yourdomain.com (where “yourdomain.com” represents your specific domain name), no additional changes are necessary.
    • If this value does not exist, create a new record of type TXT with the following values (replace “yourdomain.com” with your specific domain name:
      • Name: _dmarc.yourdomain.com
      • Contents: v=DMARC1; p=none;