Sending domain & deliverability

Review requests are transactional-ish bulk email sent on your behalf. Whether they arrive is mostly decided before you write a single subject line.

Authenticate a subdomain

Emails → Sending Domain. Add a subdomain — mail.yourstore.com, reviews.yourstore.com — not your root domain.

Use a subdomain because reputation is tracked per sending domain. If review requests ever go badly, you want that contained rather than attached to the domain your order confirmations and password resets go out on.

Evident gives you the DNS records to publish. Add them at your DNS provider, then press Verify. Propagation is usually minutes; give it up to an hour before worrying.

You are publishing:

• SPF — authorises our sending infrastructure for that subdomain.
• DKIM — signs each message so the receiver can prove it was not altered.
• A return-path record — so bounces come back to us and feed the suppression list.

Once verified, set your from-address to that subdomain under Emails → Templates.

DMARC

Evident includes a DMARC checker on the same screen. It reads the policy published on your root domain and tells you what it means for this mail.

• No DMARC record — nothing is enforced. You are fine today and exposed tomorrow.
• p=none — monitoring only. Safe, and the right place to start.
• p=quarantine or p=reject — enforced. Your subdomain must pass SPF or DKIM aligned to it, which is exactly what verifying above achieves. Sending from an unverified domain under an enforcing policy will fail hard.

What Evident does on every send

• List-Unsubscribe headers, so the one-click unsubscribe in Gmail and Apple Mail works. Someone who uses it is suppressed immediately.
• Bounce and complaint handling. A hard bounce or a spam complaint suppresses that address for the store automatically.
• Suppression before send, not after. A suppressed address is never queued.

Suppressions live under Emails → Suppressions, with a reason of UNSUBSCRIBED, BOUNCED, COMPLAINED or MANUAL. Addresses are stored hashed. You can add one by hand — useful when a customer emails you directly asking to be left alone.

If mail is landing in spam

In rough order of how often it is the cause:

1. The domain is not authenticated. Verify it. Nothing else matters as much.
2. You are sending from a free-mail address (@gmail.com) as the from-address. Do not; it fails alignment by construction.
3. The template is too heavy. Switch the step to the MINIMAL style. Image-heavy HTML with one link reads like a campaign.
4. You backfilled and blasted. A sudden first send to thousands of old addresses is the classic reputation own-goal. Review requests are capped to orders under 30 days old partly to prevent this.
5. Your reply-to is unmonitored. Mailbox providers notice when nobody ever replies to a sender.

Deliverability you cannot fix from here

Evident sends review requests. It does not send your billing email — invoices and payment notices come from our billing provider on its own domain, and cannot currently be branded to yours. If a merchant tells you they never received a billing email, that is a separate path from this one.