Welcome to your go-to-guide on adding Approved Senders and the email settings for receiving emails sent from Meltwater.

Email plays a central role in several workflows in Meltwater. In this article, you'll learn the following:

Follow these steps below walking you through how to set up an approved sender. Approved senders are needed to send Press Release Outreach and Newsletters.

If you haven’t received the verification email that’s generated through the approved sender setup flow, run through the following steps:

If the email got caught in your spam folder or you didn’t receive it at all, please share this allowlisting documentation with your IT department. It covers the steps they need to take to ensure optimal deliverability of emails sent from Meltwater.

Please reach out to our team via Live Chat within the Help button with any further questions.

Meltwater uses a third-party email delivery service for both Media Relations Outreach and analytics-enabled Newsletters. This helps us ensure optimal email deliverability, but there are some steps that you can take as a best practice and increase your individual email deliverability, such as allowlisting our IP addresses and setting up SPF, DKIM and sometimes, DMARC records.

When we talk about email deliverability we are referring to emails making it to the intended recipient and not ending up in their spam folders. When you send an email from Meltwater, we use email masking so that the email appears to come from you, rather than a general email address. This allows replies to be delivered directly to your inbox, but can introduce some intricacies if your organization has enhanced security features in place to prevent “spoofing”.

Email spoofing is the forgery of an email header so that the message appears to have originated from someone or somewhere other than the actual source as people are more likely to open an email when they think it has been sent by a legitimate source.

In order to improve email deliverability (i.e. minimizing soft bounces) a validation process is required. Meltwater enables validation by setting up SPF/DKIM records through our trusted email partner. If your organization's domain is a bulk sender, or one that has ever sent to over 5,000 recipients in a single day, Google and Yahoo! require additional email authentication requirements. In this case, you'll need to also use the DMARC record provided in the domain verification workflow, this is a TXT file that is added to your DNS records that specifies the DMARC policy. If your DNS records already include a DMARC policy, you won't need to do this.

Summary:

IP allowlisting is a method you can use to ensure that emails from a specific IP always reach their inbox. SPF and DKIM are security methods that are standardly used to combat spam issues. Setting up SPF and DKIM is considered good practice for promotional email sending as it ensures better deliverability to your recipient's inbox.

Secondarily, you may need to have a DMARC policy defined in your DNS records.

DMARC is an additional security protocol that helps prevent email fraud. It allows email domain owners to protect their domain from unauthorized use, like phishing scams, by verifying that the sender's email genuinely comes from the domain it claims to. If an email fails this check, DMARC tells email providers how to handle these unauthenticated emails, such as rejecting them or marking them as spam.

Further details:

Similarly to how you would add a contact to your email address book, IP allowlisting allows you to add specific IP’s to your allowed sender's list. Doing this confirms that you will always receive emails from those allowed IP’s to your Inbox and not your spam folder. When you allowlist a Meltwater IP address, it ensures that emails from Meltwater, such as digest reports and newsletters, are delivered to your Inbox.

SPF is an email authentication standard that compares the email sender's actual IP with a list of IP’s authorized to send for that domain. The authorized list is contained in the DNS record for the domain.

The SPF records are used to fight spam as they tell the recipient server what IP addresses are validated to send from that domain. DKIM is also a DNS record that allows recipient hosts to validate the authenticity of the sending domain, by means of a digital signature.

Setting up SPF and DKIM records shows your email recipients that you are who you say you are.

You will find that if you keep your SPF and DKIM updated, you will have better deliverability to recipients. If you find that your emails often end up in spam folders or aren’t delivered, missing or outdated SPF/ DKIM records are often the culprit. If you are a bulk sender, or have ever sent to over 5,000 recipients in a given day, newer industry requirements require DMARC policies to be included in your DNS records. In summary, having these records helps you build a good sending reputation with your domain.

There are three main steps to set up these records:

1. Request your records within the platform, 2. Ask your IT Specialist to update the records within your email and 3. Your Domain status within the platform has changed to 'Verified'

Details to send to your IT Specialist or manager of your email client:

1. Request that they allowlist the following details to ensure you receive emails sent out of Meltwater

2. The URL to your specific CNAME records

3. This hyperlinked page which outlines Meltwater's IP addresses

Further recommendations:

Note: once your IT department has successfully completed their process, additional approved senders with the same email domain (@companyname.com) can be added without further involvement from your IT department.

Once setup of an Approved Sender is completed, you will immediately start benefiting from our email analytics that informs you of how recipients engage with your content. E.g. you will learn which reporters that are interested in your pitches, which in turn will help you plan follow-ups, and potentially rethink your targeting and messaging of future pitches to drive performance.

You're seeing a high bounce rate from your release

High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors. Learn more about hard bounces and soft bounces below.

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Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.

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