Active Campaign SPF & DKIM Setup: Step by Step

If you are using the Active Campaign to send email campaigns on your domain’s behalf, first of all you should authenticate your domain.

In this article, we will explain how to authenticate your domain in Active Campaign.

First, some updates regarding the DKIM record.

Your first step is to access the Email Deliverability page. To access the Email Deliverability page:

1 – click on the“Settings,” located on the left menu.
2 – Select “Advanced”
3 – Click the “I will manage my own email authentication” option.

See the screenshot below,

Once you select the “I will manage my own email authentication” option, two CNAME records will be generated, which you need to publish in your DNS.

In the below screenshot see an example of the published CNAME records (DNS Cloudflare).

Once you publish the provided CNAME records in your DNS head back to your Active Campaign account enter your domain name and click on the “Check DNS” button.

And if you have done everything properly, you’ll see the notification “Your DNS is set up correctly!” 
And finally finish the process by clicking on the “Save Settings” button.

Active Campaign SPF Record Configuration:

Note: Configure SPF record for Active Campaign only if you have Marketing Enterprise plan in Active Campaign, since having Custom Mailserver Domain is available only for that plan.
This is set up by submitting a ticket. They will then provide instructions for setting up the appropriate CNAME record.

If you are using other than Marketing Enterprise plan there is no need to set up an SPF record for  Active Campaign, as the “Envelope From” domain will always be handled by the servers of Active Campaign. For SPF to be aligned you should have your “From address” domain in the “Envelope From” address.  Active Campaign uses “s17.avl3.acemsrvc.com” and other domains as the “Envelope From” domain, during the DMARC check, this “Envelope From” domain will not match with your “From address” domain, so SPF alignment will fail. This happens not only with Active Campaign but with the majority of Email Service Providers. But during the configurations Active Campaign will suggest you adding this include  include:emsd1.com  in your SPF record. Just be informed that there is no need to do this, as SPF will fail due to misalignment, even if you add that include in your SPF record.

In case you add the include provided from Active Campaign in your SPF record, your SPF record will look like the one below,
v=spf1 include:zoho.com  include:emsd1.com  ~all

Also, keep in mind that DMARC requires either DKIM or SPF to be authenticated and aligned, so you will pass the DMARC check even without SPF alignment. SPF alignment failing won’t affect your email deliverability if you have DKIM in place. Thus you need to set up only DKIM for  Active Campaign.

Once you finish configuring the DKIM record for Active Campaign you can test it with our  Email Investigation tool. (See the screenshot below)