Email Sender Authentication through VoterVoice

When using VoterVoice to send email broadcasts to your supporters, we will notify you if the domain you are sending from requires additional authentication. If so, any broadcast you send through your organization’s VoterVoice system will temporarily come from an @votervoice.net email rather than an email address from your domain. Once authenticated, broadcasts will come from your domain again.

Why is this important?

Often domains have preventative measures in place to ensure that bad actors cannot “spoof” the domain without authorization. There's a variety of ways, in your domain settings, to set up "trusted" or "authenticated" senders on your behalf. When your organization sends email through VoterVoice, we are delivering that email on behalf of your domain. If you don’t authorize us to do that through your domain, it can result in lots of emails sent to spam or failed emails.

You will likely need the domain administrator at your organization to help with the following instructions.

How do I authenticate VoterVoice to send on behalf of my domain?

If you see the following message on the Compose Page when sending a broadcast:

This means you will need to add a DKIM key from VoterVoice to your domain’s TXT records for us to properly send on behalf of your domain. You will only see this message if your domain has strict settings that do not allow spoofing–essentially where your DMARC records are set to quarantine or reject. Follow the link in the message to the Email Sender Authentication page.

Choose your domain from this page to get started. You will see a box for “DKIM Selector”. We have this prefilled, but you can modify it if you’d like. It just identifies VoterVoice as the vendor for this entry in your records. Click “Start Authentication.”

Next, you’ll see two boxes, one for “DNS Record Name” and another for “DNS Record Content.” You will need to copy both of these and send them to your domain administrator. Ask them to add a DNS TXT record with those values. 

Once your domain administrator has added that DNS TXT record and successfully published it, click on “Validate that DNS is set up correctly.” This will tell us whether we can complete the setup from the VoterVoice end. 

If successful, you will see the status next to your domain change to “Pending.” 

At this point, we deploy your record into our email sending infrastructure so that we can send on behalf of your domain. This step should complete automatically within 24 hours.

At that point, you will see the status next to your domain change to “Verified.” Moving forward, if you use any email from that domain in the Compose Page, emails will come from that email address at that domain. 

Here is a short video that details how to set up DKIM in VoterVoice through the Email Sender Authentication.

 

Other authentication options - SPF

If your association has a restrictive SPF record that doesn't include VoterVoice, that could contribute to email deliverability issues as well. To add VoterVoice, please add:

include:_spf.votervoice.net

to your existing SPF records before the "all" part of the statement. Make sure it is set up as an include and contains the underscore. Note that it can take up to 24 hours for a change to your SPF records to take effect.

Examples:

This is an example of a strict SPF record that does not include VoterVoice:

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com -all

This is an example of a strict SPF record that correctly includes VoterVoice:

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:_spf.votervoice.net -all

 

Questions & support

If you have any questions on this process please contact VoterVoice support at [e-mail]. 

Though we do not currently support CNAME record / return path modification as a method of sender authentication, we plan to support this method in the future.