How to authenticate authors on Bento

When you send email from Bento, you get to choose what author to send your email as. Whenever you add a new author to Bento, you should make sure DMARC is configured for the domain name used by that sender - or risk having your emails end up in spam.

How to add an author

  1. Go to the site your want to add an author to.
  2. Select "Emails" > "Authors".
  3. Click the "Add author" button in the top right of the page.
  4. Fill in the form with the author's name and the email address you want to send your emails from. You can customize the signature if you want, or leave it as is.

After having added the author you'll find yourself back at the authors list. You should see yellow text under the author you just added saying "Not Authenticated (DMARC Failing)". This is what we need to fix.

How to authenticate your author

Select "Settings" > "Sender Authentication" in the sidebar menu. On this page you'll see a section for each unique domain name that your authors use. If you only have one domain name, you should only see one section.

DNS records for SPF and DKIM

Each section contains a list of CNAME and TXT DNS records that you need to create in your DNS provider's control panel. The records are unique to your site, so you can't just copy them from here.

Be aware when copy/pasting that a trailing space might sneak its way into the end of the values, ie bbb.domainkey.u35886803.wl054.sendgrid.net instead of bbb.domainkey.u35886803.wl054.sendgrid.net. You might have to manually delete that space when creating the DNS records.

Adding those records to DNS takes care of both SPF and DKIM.

DMARC record

You should also create a DMARC record, or if you already have one, update it. Below the list of DNS records for each domain name is the DMARC record that Bento recommends you create.

A nice touch here is that if you already have a DMARC record, they'll actually show you the updated record including all your previous settings. This way you can just copy the whole thing and paste it into your DNS provider's control panel.

After having created the above records, click "refresh" in your browser. Bento should now show a list of green checkmarks next to each DNS record. If not, sit tight for a while until DNS propagates and try again.

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