Authenticating your sending domain

Cobber sends two kinds of email on your behalf:

• Transactional email — receipts, membership welcomes and renewals, volunteer and contact-form confirmations. These come from sensible addresses on your sending domain, like donations@, membership@ and contact@.
• Campaign email — mass emails to your supporters, sent from whatever from address and name you configure for the campaign.

Your sending domain is completely independent of your web address — you can serve your pages from crm.yourmovement.org.au and still send email from email.yourmovement.org.au. You can also register more than one sending domain.

What authenticating means

“Authenticating” a domain means proving to mailbox providers (Gmail, Outlook and the rest) that Cobber is allowed to send email as your organisation. This is what keeps your email out of spam and out of the way of impersonation. Cobber uses two standard mechanisms:

The two mechanisms

Mechanism	What it does
DKIM	Cryptographically signs your outgoing mail so receivers can confirm it’s genuinely from you and hasn’t been tampered with.
Custom Return-Path	Handles bounces on a subdomain of yours and aligns your mail so it passes strict inbox checks (DMARC).

You set this up once per domain and there’s no ongoing maintenance. The Go Live page walks you through your first sending domain, and the Email domains page is where you add more, see each domain’s status, and verify them. Either way Cobber generates the exact records specific to your domain, tells you what to add, and checks them for you — so you don’t have to work any of it out by hand.

Why this doesn’t clash with anything else. DKIM uses a unique selector — a label that identifies the signer — so Cobber’s signing key sits alongside any other provider’s without conflict. The Return-Path lives on its own subdomain. Both are purely additive: turning them on doesn’t remove, replace or interfere with the email authentication your existing system uses.

Sending from a subdomain

Just like your web address, you can authenticate and send from your top-level domain (e.g. donations@yourmovement.org.au) or from a subdomain (e.g. donations@action.yourmovement.org.au). Both are fully supported — the authentication simply attaches to whichever domain or subdomain you choose to send from.

Sending from a subdomain is a common and clean approach during a transition: it lets Cobber’s email run on its own clearly-separated domain while your existing system keeps sending from the main domain. It also keeps your sending reputations independent, which is good hygiene.

Managing your sending domains

You can register as many sending domains as you like — each is independent of your web address, and any of them can be used as a from address. Manage them on the Email domains page in your dashboard. For each domain you add, Cobber shows the DNS records to add at your registrar and a status:

Cobber checks the records for you

Every time the Email domains page loads, Cobber looks up your DKIM and Return-Path records in public DNS and shows what it actually found against what it expects:

What the record status means

Status	What it means
✓ Found	The record is published and matches. Nothing to do.
Not found	Nothing is published at that name yet. Either it hasn’t been added, or it hasn’t propagated — give it an hour before assuming the worst.
× Points to …	Something is published, but it isn’t ours. Almost always a typo or a truncated value pasted into the registrar. This is the one worth looking at carefully, because it looks correct at a glance.

Finding both records is not the same as being verified. This check is Cobber reading public DNS. Your email provider has to confirm the domain independently, and it only does that when you press Verify. If the page says both records are correct and the domain still says pending, the answer is almost always that nobody has clicked the button.

Domain statuses

Status	What it means
Not provisioned	The domain has been added but isn’t registered for sending yet. Cobber registers it and hands you the DNS records to add.
Pending verification	The domain is registered but not yet confirmed. Check the record status above: if either record reads Not found or Points to …, fix it at your registrar. If both read Found, the records are fine and the only thing left is to click Verify.
Verified	DKIM and Return-Path both check out. The domain is authenticated and ready to send from.

A sending domain only needs to be verified before your emails use it — and “verified” always means you clicked Verify and it came back clean, never just that the DNS looks right.

Moving across from another platform? You don’t have to switch everything at once — see running Cobber alongside your existing system.