How to change the “From” email address

Occasionally, your customers will have told you that they haven’t received their booking confirmation email from BookingLive. This can be frustrating for you and the customer.

The following article describes the steps required to ensure your customers receive emails by authenticating your domain to send emails from BookingLive.

Why do I need to authenticate my domain?

When email is sent from one server to another, a simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) is used to send the email. If the sender’s email address is not authenticated for the domain it is sending from, the recipient can reject the email.

Email clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and others have embraced DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance). DMARC is a security measure to help reduce email spoofing. It checks for an SPF record, to ensure the mail server is authenticated to send email from that domain. The SPF record is checked very early in the SMTP conversation, before the body of the message has been transmitted.

For example, you want to send booking confirmation emails from bill.gates@microsoft.com. The recipient has a Gmail account. Once the email is sent, Gmail will check that a BookingLive SPF record exists on your microsoft.com domain DNS. If it doesn’t, it will reject the email.

What do I need to do?

Option 1. Do nothing
By default your emails are sent from noreply@bookinglive.co.uk which is an authenticated domain. Hooray!

Option 2. Change the “from” email address
If you want to send email from your own email address, you will need to follow these steps.

1. Contact BookingLive support and request a custom from address. We recommend noreply@yourdomain.com
2. Provide us with your domain and nameserver. If you don’t know the nameserver, do a lookup here
3. We will request CNAME records from SendGrid and email you the details
4. You will add the CNAME records via the domain DNS
5. We will approve and authenticate the domain in SendGrid
6. You will login to BookingLive and change the from address within Settings > Mail

What else should I do?

That’s it! Your emails will now be sent safe and secure. If you want to improve the booking experience for your customers we recommend you update your customer communications.

Find out more

BookingLive have partnered with SendGrid, an SMTP service. Through SendGrid, BookingLive can authenticate your domain allowing you to use custom “from” email addresses. By following the steps above, SPF, DKIM and Return-Path records will be setup in your DNS. For more information, check out this article on DMARC.