Set up your email sending domain

When your website runs on Kite, your sending domain gets set up as part of connecting the domain to the site. Kite builds the email records alongside the records that point your domain at the website, so you don't have to set them up separately.

There are two ways this happens:

• You buy the domain through Kite. Kite registers and manages the domain for you, so it adds the email records itself and starts verification right away. You don't touch DNS at all.
• You connect a domain you already own. During setup, you sign in to your domain provider in a guided window, and the website and email records are added there in one step. Kite then asks the email service to verify the domain.

DNS changes can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to spread across the internet. If the domain isn't verified yet when Kite first checks, Kite checks again the next time email needs to go out from it.

Once the domain is verified, the email your website sends uses it. When a visitor fills in your contact form and you reply, your answer reaches them from your own domain under your site's name, instead of from a generic address. That's exactly the mail people tend to miss when it lands in spam, because the visitor asked for it and is waiting for it.

If you send campaigns through Resend, Kite sets up your sending domain inside your Resend account. Connect your account, tell Kite which domain or address you want your email to come from, and Kite adds that domain to Resend.

Resend then generates the records your domain needs: a DKIM key unique to your domain, an SPF record, and a record that routes bounced mail back so Resend can track it. Kite gives you those records with each one's exact name and value, along with the steps for your domain provider. Once you've added them, Kite triggers verification in Resend and reports when the domain moves from pending to verified.

Kite also turns on open and click tracking for the domain, so later campaigns have engagement numbers to report. If your domain isn't verified when you ask for a campaign, Kite sets it up first, because Resend won't send from an unverified domain.

Many teams send marketing email from a subdomain, such as news.yourcompany.com, rather than from the main domain their staff use for everyday email. That keeps a bad campaign from hurting the reputation of the address your team uses to talk to customers. Kite can set up the subdomain the same way it sets up a main domain.

DMARC is the record that ties SPF and DKIM together, and it's also the one most often missing. Kite writes your DMARC record for you and explains where to add it. A sensible first record tells inboxes to deliver mail that fails as usual and to send you daily reports. In DNS, that record is a text entry named _dmarc with a value like v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@yourcompany.com.

Starting in monitoring mode matters. The reports show every service sending mail as your domain, including ones you forgot about, like a billing system that emails invoices or an old newsletter tool. Once every legitimate sender passes, you can move the policy to send failing mail to spam, and later to reject it. A stricter policy stops other people from sending convincing fake email as your company.

DMARC also checks alignment, which means the domain in the From line has to match the domain that passed SPF or DKIM. This is where many setups fail. If your newsletter tool signs mail with its own domain while your From line shows yours, the message passes DKIM but fails DMARC. Kite sends only from domains it has verified, so the mail it sends lines up with your From address.

For services Kite doesn't control, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, you turn on DKIM in that provider's admin settings. Kite can tell you which settings to look for and write a single SPF record that includes every service you send from, so adding a new tool never leaves you with two competing SPF records.

Gmail shows "Be careful with this message" or "This message seems dangerous" when it can't confirm who sent an email or when something in the message looks like phishing. If your own marketing emails carry these banners, the cause is almost always one of a few things you can fix:

• The message failed SPF, DKIM, or DMARC, often because the tool that sent it isn't in your SPF record or isn't signing with your domain.
• The From address uses one domain while the message was sent and signed by another, so it fails the alignment check.
• You sent through a third-party tool using a free Gmail or Outlook address in the From line. Only Google and Microsoft can authenticate mail for those domains, so mail sent as them from anywhere else fails DMARC.
• The email contains link shorteners, links whose visible text doesn't match where they go, hidden text, or attachments that look like a login page.
• The domain is brand new and has no sending history yet.

Kite handles the first three through the setup described above. It handles the rest through how it writes and sends email. Kite keeps cold outreach to plain text with at most one link, and its emails come from an address on a domain it has verified. When it sends a batch, it sends to a small first group, confirms those messages were accepted, and only then sends the rest.

Google Postmaster Tools is Google's free dashboard for people who send email to Gmail addresses. It shows your spam complaint rate, whether your mail passes SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and whether you meet Google's requirements for bulk senders. It's the most direct way to see how Gmail treats your domain.

To use it, sign in at postmaster.google.com with a Google account, add your sending domain, and copy the verification record Google gives you. Add that record at your domain provider, then return to Postmaster Tools and click Verify. Data starts appearing once you send a meaningful daily volume to Gmail addresses, so a very small sender may see empty charts for a while.

Kite doesn't connect to Postmaster Tools directly. You can share a screenshot of your dashboard with Kite in the chat, and it will read the spam rate and authentication results and tell you what to fix. Keep your spam rate under 0.1 percent if you can. Google treats 0.3 percent as the line where problems start.

Authentication proves an email is from you, but your reputation decides whether inboxes want it. A new domain starts with no history, so the first few weeks of sending carry extra weight.

Kite protects that reputation in the way it builds lists and writes emails. It sends only to people with a clear reason to hear from you and skips anyone marked as unsubscribed in your connected tools or in your team's records. With Resend connected, Kite adds people who ask to stop to Resend's suppression list, so later campaigns skip them automatically. Cold outreach ends with a line telling the reader how to opt out, which costs you a few replies but saves you spam complaints.

After each send, Kite reads the results. In Resend, that covers messages delivered, bounced, opened, clicked, marked as spam, and unsubscribed. A rise in bounces points to a stale list, and a rise in complaints points to the wrong audience or too many emails. Kite tells you what it sees and changes the next campaign to match.