How sending domains work
Available on Talent Buyer and agency plans (not Artist Essentials). Requires a business domain — generic addresses such as @gmail.com can't be verified.
By default, Gigwell sends booking email from a masked address so replies are tracked in Gigwell.
After you verify your domain, email is sent from a subdomain (for example,
you@bookings.youragency.com), which keeps your main domain protected.The DNS codes you receive are valid for 72 hours. If you don't add them in time, request new codes.
By default, outbound booking email goes out from a Gigwell address that carries a routing ID. If you'd rather your offers, contracts and invoices come from your agency's own domain, we can set that up — you add a short set of DNS records at your domain host, and we switch it on. The records are specific to your account, so they're issued to you rather than generated from your settings, and the propagation check happens on our side.
How do I send booking email from my own domain?
Start a chat from the messenger and tell us the domain you want to send from, and who manages your DNS, so we know whether the records go to you or straight to your IT provider. We'll send you the exact records to add. There will be several DKIM CNAME records under a
bookingssubdomain, one SPF entry, and one DMARC record.Sign in to your DNS host — wherever your domain's records live — and open the DNS or Records section for that domain.
Add each record exactly as we send it, following the two rules below.
Tell us when they're in. We confirm they've propagated and enable your custom sender. Propagation can take up to 48 hours.
The two things that break most setups
Leave the domain off the end of the DKIM name. Nearly every DNS host appends your domain to whatever you type in the name field. So enter the name as:
<selector>._domainkey.bookings
and not <selector>._domainkey.bookings.yourdomain.com. Typing the full name doubles the hostname, and the record will never validate. This is by far the most common reason a domain setup fails.
Only one DMARC record may exist per domain. If your domain already has a DMARC record, amend the existing one rather than adding a second. Two DMARC records break DMARC entirely, and mail that was being delivered fine may start getting rejected.
Can I change the address my booking emails come from?
Once your custom sending domain is live, your emails go out from an address on the @bookings. subdomain of your own domain — something like you@bookings.yourdomain.com. Here's what you can and can't change about it.
Changing the part before the @
The local part — everything before the @ — comes from the Gigwell login email of whoever is sending. There is no separate "sender address" field to fill in, so you change it by changing the login address.
Decide which address you want the emails to appear to come from.
Work out which user account is doing the sending. That's the account whose login email is showing up on the message.
Change that user's registered login email address to the one you want, in their user settings.
From then on, that user's sends carry the new local part.
Why the "bookings." part can't be removed
The bookings. portion of the domain is not removable. Gigwell uses that subdomain to route replies back to the booking they belong to, so an address without it would break the message thread on the booking.
If that doesn't work
DNS changes can take a few hours to propagate. If records were added recently and verification hasn't passed yet, give it a little time before assuming they're wrong.
If the records are in and mail still isn't sending from your domain, message us with a screenshot of each record exactly as your DNS host displays it, and tell us whether a DMARC record already existed on the domain before you started. Include the steps you've already completed and any exact error text, copied as it appears. We'll compare the records against what we issued and confirm what's propagated.
Good to know
SPF names the servers allowed to send mail for your domain. DKIM signs your outbound mail cryptographically. DMARC tells receiving servers what to do if either check fails. All three together are what keeps your mail out of spam folders.
Sending from your own authenticated domain gets filtered noticeably less often than sending from a generic address, which is usually the reason people set this up.
Replies land in two places: the booking's message thread and the sending user's own inbox. You don't need to configure anything for that.
Each person who sends from a booking sends under their own login address. There's no single shared "from" address for the whole agency — if you want everything to look like it comes from one place, send from one account.
Contract and e-signature emails are the exception. Their sender identity is a single organisation-wide setting and doesn't follow whoever clicked send — see the article on the wrong sender showing on contract emails.
If you don't have a custom sending domain yet, your address will still be a Gigwell one containing a routing ID.
Never share an API key or password in a chat or an email — with us or anyone else. Nothing in this setup requires one.
If you have any questions or need additional help, please reach out to support@gigwell.com or use the chat widget on your screen.