It’s easy to send messages in Intercom from your own email address. We recommend using your own domain to improve the personalization and deliverability of your emails.

By default, your temporary Intercom email address is set as your outbound email address. You can find this in Settings > Channels > Email:

Your default outbound email address will appear as your "from" address when your customers receive an email in their inbox.

If you’d like to use your own email address for your outbound emails, you can set this up in one of two ways:

You may want your emails to appear as though they’re coming from your company domain. If you signed up to Intercom using your company email address, you can easily set this up by changing your default outbound email address.

Select Use your domain and email address, found within Settings > Channels > Email👇

After verifying your domain, when you’re setting up an outbound email, your "from" address will be the address you used to sign up to Intercom.

This will also appear as the "from" address on your outbound emails in email clients.

To change these addresses, or to use a shared team email address like support@examply.com, you should add a custom email address. In Option 2 we'll show you how.

If you’d like to send your emails using a different email address, like a shared email address, you can do this by adding it as a custom email address. This is useful if you’d like certain outbound emails to appear as coming from a team, or if you'd like to change how your name appears in email clients.

​Go to the Settings > Channels > Email and, under Sender email addresses section, select Use your domain and email address.

Toggle the Map to inbound email address switch to ensure replies to inbound emails will send from the verified custom address the customer contacts you through. With this option, if a customer contacts you through support@examply.com, then your replies will also come from support@examply.com.

Next click on Add custom address, enter the display name and custom email address you want to use, and click Confirm.

If you're using a previously unverified email address, we’ll send you an email to confirm it, and you'll also need to verify your domain with a DKIM record. We explain how to do this below.

Once you verify your email and your domain, you’ll be able to choose this address when setting up an outbound email from Proactive Support, or creating a new email conversation from the Help Desk.

The last step is to choose the default address for group conversations, forwards and notification emails. Custom addresses are also available to select from the email editor.

If you’re sending a once-off email to a small group VIP customers, for example, you might want to receive their replies directly in your email client. You can do this by changing the "reply to" address of your outbound email.

First, choose a custom email address as your "from" address.

Then, you can change the "reply to" address to a custom email address.

Now, replies to your message will go to that email address only.

When you're ready to send email in Intercom, we highly recommend using your own address. This means you must verify your domain so that email clients can be confident it was sent by us with your permission. Verifying your domain also removes emails being tagged with “via intercom-mail.com" in some email clients, such as Gmail or Outlook.

To achieve this, we use DKIM to sign the messages we send on your behalf. Email clients can verify these signatures against the DNS record you set up for your domain.

Together with DNS records for custom return paths and the DMARC record, we're able to fully align the domains in the email header to assure recipient mail servers that Intercom is authorized by you to send emails for your domain. A custom return path record allows the email you send from Intercom to be SPF aligned for DMARC.

Without setting up your domain, you and your customers will see an Unauthenticated warning, like this👇

Visit the Domains page in email settings. This page contains the information you'll need to configure the DNS records for each of the domains you use as part of your sender addresses. It'll look like this 👇

Select the name of your domain provider to get tailored setup instructions. Click on Share instructions to get specific instructions you can share with your IT team.

Click Next to move to step 2: Copy your records. Here you can copy the names and values of the CNAME and TXT entries to update your external DNS configuration.

Your domain will show as unauthenticated until all three records - the two CNAME records and the TXT record - have been added to your DNS records and propagated by your DNS provider.

If two or more of your sender addresses use the same domain, you will only need to configure the DNS entries once for emails sent using any of these addresses. 

The final step is to click on Check status. If configured correctly your status will change for each DNS record will change to Authenticated and your domain will be fully validated.

If the DNS records are all correctly created, the records will each be marked as Authenticated. It may take up to 24 hours for the DNS records to propagate after you make the change however, depending on your provider.

Teammates can be notified if there are any email deliverability issues with this workspace in Settings > Channels > Email and under the Domain tab. The workspace creator and the billing admin will always be notified by default and can't be removed from being notified.

Teammates added to this list will be notified if email sending is paused, and your workspace is under review.

We will use the default email address selected when enabling the option.

Email notifications are sent from the default email address.

If the conversation starts through chat and we have the user’s email we will send them the usual email notification when the admin replies. The notification will come from the selected default address (ex. support@company.com).

If you select ‘You’ as the from address when sending an outbound message, then the address you signed up with will be the from/reply address, e.g. support.example@company.com. After the end user replies and you send another email, the initial sender will be the kept as the 'From'.

No, Intercom handles that for you. Emails sent from Intercom include a return-path header. When a recipient mail server receives one of our emails and checks the SPF record of the domain in our return-path, they will see that our sending IP addresses are authorized senders.

However, you should create a custom return path record so that we can align the return path on the emails you send via Intercom with your domain. See the instructions above for how to do that.

Yes, you should. We very much encourage enabling DMARC and we will highlight domains as unauthenticated in the UI if DMARC is not enabled. A DMARC policy on your domain is one of the best mechanisms to combat email spoofing. It will tell recipient email servers how to handle emails which claim to come from your domain. If you believe there is a potential risk of spammers spoofing your domain, DMARC can help. From the 1st February 2024, it will be required by Google and Yahoo if you are sending more than 5,000 emails per day.

DMARC checks that the domain in the "from" address of your emails matches the domain in your DKIM records or the domain in the return-path header. Once you've set up the CNAME records for Intercom, you're all set to create the DMARC record. The simplest possible DMARC record is a _dmarc TXT record containing “v=DMARC1; p=none”. However, we encourage you to look into setting up DMARC reporting to a DMARC report analysis service as part of moving to a quarantine or reject policy. This will help protect your customers from spammers attempting to spoof your email address.

For domains with a DMARC policy and a valid DKIM and custom return path setup for Intercom, emails sent through our platform will pass DMARC without a problem.

From the 1st February 2024, Yahoo and Google require DMARC if you are sending more than 5,000 emails per day. Intercom recommends you do so regardless of how many emails you are sending however. See the instructions above for how to do so.

If you want your existing ongoing messages to send from your newly created custom email address, you’ll need to update them manually.

While we provide a DNS standard CNAME record, some providers do not allow it.

Sometimes this is not allowed because of the '_' character. We require using a CNAME, because we may in future rotate our DKIM private keys. If we do this, having a CNAME record set up prevents disruption on your side.

Some providers will manually add the CNAME for you if you contact them, so that might be something to explore with your provider, if they don't accept the provided CNAME by default.

No, at Intercom we use shared IPs with strict enforcement of thresholds and sending performance to ensure that our shared pools are healthy and incidents are kept rare.

We have found shared IPs to be low-risk and even beneficial for most senders when our Email Sending Guidelines are enforced. We actively take away sending rights from bad senders to reinforce this. If we find that one of our customers has poor sending performance and complaints of spam they will be shut down before they can cause global impact.

At Intercom we also use a variety of tools such as 250ok, MXToolbox, Microsoft SNDS, and Google Postmaster to monitor our sending reputation. We have our own in-house dashboards, monitoring, alarming and paging for any blacklisting events so we can stay on top of any bad actors.

If you're adding CNAME records in CloudFlare and they still show as unverified in Intercom, there are a couple of things to check: