Email Authentication for Google Domain Hosted on Netlify DNS

Hi all,

I’m new to Netlify, and I’ve encountered an issue with authenticating the emails from my domain name after hosting the website on Netlify DNS.

Domain name: www.civilmedia.io OR 'civilmedia.netlify.app"
Domain name provider: Google Domains

The issue is as follows. I purchased the domain name above from google domains. Since I’m hosting on Netlify, I set custom name servers on my Google Domain console to point to the Netlify name servers. Additionally, I’ve added the MX records from the Google domain name to my Netlify DNS records. As a result, I am able to send emails to team@civilmedia.io (the email account registered with my Domain Name) with no issue.

I noticed recently, however, that when team@civilmedia.io sends a message to ME, the message comes with the following warning: “Gmail couldn’t verify that the civilmedia.io actually sent this message (and not a spammer)”.

A red question mark appears instead of our logo in the email header area.

My question is - how can I authenticate emails that come from my custom Google domain while still using Netlify DNS to host my website?

I’m sure I’m just being naive and there’s a simple solution to this, but so far I’ve spent a number of hours searching for other users who have encountered this issue to no avail. I would sincerely appreciate any advice you can offer!

Thank you.

@mdevesh Welcome to the Netlify community.

It looks as though you did almost everything correctly in trying to set up the DNS records for Gmail, but the v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all TXT record should NOT be in quotes.

Once you get that entry correct, your error message should disappear (after DNS propagation, of course!).

@gregraven

Thank you so much for your quick response here. I’m going to make that change now!

Thanks for this. Google domains list SPF record in quotes, so if anyone else (like me) just copies it over, it won’t work.

1 Like

Thanks for letting us know, @robert-moore!

Hi I am having a very similar issue where it is marking the emails as spam.

I removed the quotes for the SPF record, but do you keep them for the TEXT DKIM record, or no quotes for any records?

BTW, this thread has been really helpful

Thanks :slight_smile:

Hi, @archieeng. This serverfault post might be helpful: