Connecting to MailChimp's Transactional Email Service

Help Center

Connecting to MailChimp's Transactional Email Service

Before Mailchimp can authenticate emails for your domain, you’ll need to validate the SPF and DKIM records for your sending domain in your Mandrill account or using the MailChimp API.

To validate SPF and DKIM records for your sending domain in the web interface:

Go to Settings in your Transactional Email account.
From the Domains menu at the top of the page choose Sending Domains.
Click the Test DNS Settings button to check the DNS settings for your sending domain.
Tip
We strongly recommend verifying all domains where a user might send from. This allows all emails to appear as if they come from the sender and NOT from mandrill.
You also need to create a Subaccount in the system that matches the name your instance, e.g, YOURSITE.ADORBIT.com. Enter the subaccount before sending any system emails.
Once the test is complete, click the View DKIM Settings and View SPF Settings links for more detailed information about your current settings and any suggested changes. Please refer to Mailchimp's help documentation Mailchimp's help documentation for more detailed instructions.

Once you’ve added the appropriate DNS records, it can take up to 24 hours for the changes to take full effect. If there’s an error validating your records, view the error details in Mandrill for additional information. There are also some third-party resources you can use to check your records or for other details if needed:

Verify your SPF record using an online SPF record testing tool. Enter your domain name in the first text box and click Get SPF Record (if any) for a diagnostic of your SPF records.
Check whether your DKIM record is valid using the DKIMCore validator. Enter Mandrill as the selector and your domain name.
Mandrill’s SPF validator looks for a TXT record with the appropriate SPF information. If your domain has an SPF type record only, you’ll need to add a matching TXT record for compatibility.
If you already have an SPF record, edit that record instead of adding a new one. The specs for SPF require that there only be one TXT record with SPF information.
If you’ve added the DKIM record and are still seeing that it’s missing, your DNS provider may require the record be formatted differently. The DKIM record Mandrill provides has semicolons escaped with a backslash, so the record starts with this: v=DKIM1\; k=rsa\; and ends like this: \;.
Some DNS providers don’t require semicolons be escaped. If you’re seeing issues, try removing the backslashes right before semicolons at the beginning and end of the record.
Some DNS providers take longer than others to publish and push the record. If you’re adding a completely new record, those often validate within 10-15 minutes. Changing records can take longer, but can vary based on your DNS provider and TTL for the record.

When you add SPF and DKIM records for your domain, you also need to verify that domain. Domain verification is a required step to confirm ownership of a domain. Once you verify a domain in your account, any other Mandrill user that wants to sign with that domain will also need to go through the verification process. If they don't verify the domain, the email will still be delivered, but will be signed with a generic mandrillapp.com signature. Learn how to verify a domain.

Tip

Mandrill doesn't currently validate DMARC records for your sending domains, but you're welcome to use DMARC in addition to SPF and DKIM. How you implement DMARC is independent of your using Mandrill.

We recommend running DMARC in notification mode only (with p=none in the DMARC record to indicate that mail that fails should be delivered normally) to get an idea for how much mail would be affected by switching to a stricter policy.

In this section:

Help Center

Connecting to MailChimp's Transactional Email Service

Tip

Tip

Search results