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Connect sending

Turn on managed sending, verify a domain, and add a sender.

Before you can send, a project needs sending connected, a verified sending domain, and at least one sender address. All of this happens on the Settings → Sending page — provider credentials never travel through the API or MCP.

Connect sending

Open Settings → Sending and choose Add provider. Pick Send & Retain's managed sending: there's no account to create and no key to paste. It starts on a small daily volume and warms up automatically.

Already sending through Resend or SendGrid? You can add that key here too — alongside managed sending it shares the load and takes over if delivery has trouble. The key is validated against the provider and stored encrypted; it's never logged and never leaves the server.

Verify a sending domain

On the same page, add your domain — a subdomain like mail.acme.com, not the bare root — and publish the DNS records shown (SPF and DKIM). Once the domain reports verified, it can send. A from-address must resolve to a verified domain or the send is rejected.

The records shown cover SPF and DKIM, but not DMARC — publish it yourself in the same DNS session:

_dmarc.mail.acme.com   TXT   "v=DMARC1; p=none;"

Gmail and Yahoo's bulk-sender rules require a DMARC record on the From domain, and Gmail only offers recipients "unsubscribe" instead of "report spam" when the sender is fully authenticated — DMARC turns complaints into harmless unsubscribes. A record on the root domain (_dmarc.acme.com) also works.

Start with p=none (monitor only); add rua=mailto:[email protected] for aggregate reports and tighten to p=quarantine once they look clean. DMARC is advisory here: the dashboard and verifyDomain surface its status (found / missing), but it never blocks verification or sending.

Add a sender

Add a sender address on the verified domain (e.g. [email protected]) and, optionally, set it as the project default. Sends with no explicit from use the default sender.

Sending is connected only on the settings page. Over MCP, email_get_connection_status returns that page as settingsUrl — no tool accepts a provider key, and a human always connects sending.

Next steps

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