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| Resources Home / Authenticating Your MailChimp Campaigns |
Authenticating Your MailChimp CampaignsBackground Information: Email authentication is a way to say, "This email is from MailChimp's servers, but it's being sent on behalf of me, so you can trust it." It basically prevents your email from looking spoofed (like a forgery). Some ISPs recognize authentication and mark the email with an icon that means, "this email appears to be trustworthy." Authenticated emails seem to get through some corporate email firewalls easier than non-authenticated emails, but it all depends on whether or not your recipients' email servers are setup to check for it. How to Activate Authentication
Pros & ConsThe big pro is better deliverability. We've seen authenticated emails get past some pretty tough corporate email firewalls. No, it doesn't mean if you send viagra spam, you'll get through spam filters like magic. But if you're sending legitimate marketing email to permission lists, and you find yourself getting blocked a little too often, authentication might help. Authentication is rumored to help with email throttling issues, as well (where servers block you because you're sending to too many recipients on their network). In general, authentication makes your emails look a little more trustworthy. Some email services (like Yahoo!Mail Beta) will add a teeny-tiny little logo to your email, indicating that it's more "trustworthy" than non-authenticated emails. Their thinking is that over time, people will begin to look for that logo. The only con is that some of your recipients might be using email programs that show that the email came from MailChimp's server. It's actually not very obvious, but a few people might notice it.
Let's say a company called "Acme Bananas" sends a newsletter with the reply-to address of "news@acmebananas.com". Some email programs will show it came from one of our servers (mcsv1.net, mcsv2.net, etc) and that it was sent on behalf of Acme Bananas. See the screenshots below (it's hard to spot, but it's there)... This is how authenticated emails look in Outlook 2007:
This is how authenticated emails look in Mozilla Thunderbird:
This is how authenticated emails look in Microsoft Entourage (for the Mac):
It's not a huge deal, and the only nerds who'd notice it are the ones who already know your emails come from MailChimp anyway. Not all email programs bother to add this extra "Sender" field, so we don't think very many people will even notice. The major email programs we've found:
The authentication option in MailChimp is per-campaign, not for your entire account. So if you just want to test it on some campaigns for a little while, you can. Want to learn more about email authentication?Would you like to learn more about all this email authentication stuff? Here's a more detailed article: How Email Authentication Works See Also:
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To activate authentication for your MailChimp campaigns, you'll first need to activate the feature on the "Add-ons" page under your "Account" tab (