DKIM setup for 1&1 Ionos

DMARC Questions about DKIM
1

Dear Forum,

For a client I have who uses Ionos to host their email and domain. Their SPF, DMARC is all setup fine but I cannot find any help or setup for DKIM.

Any help of suggestions would be much appreciated.

Kind regards
Kevin

2

Hi Kevin,

For setting up DKIM on 1&1 Ionos, you will need to create either a TXT or CNAME records. 3rd party systems should provide you with the information that needs to be put into DNS. If you are using a email security gateway, you’ll have to generate the keys, and take the information provided for the public key and publish that to DNS.

So it really depends on where/how you are getting the DKIM information.

  • Shehzad
3

Hi Shehzad,

Many thanks for your reply. I talked to Ionos and they said currently they do not support DKIM.

I must admit I did not feel entirely confident with the response from their support.

Regards
Kevin

4

That is an odd reply from them. I’ve put in DKIM entries as CNAME records for one of our domains. We got records information from Sendgrid (since that is what we are using to send mail for that domain). Works without issue.

  • Shehzad
5

My client is using the Ionos business mail service which is POP3/IMAP, so it would seem they are not able to supply the record information.

Ionos sell and supply MS 365 so I’ll suggest to the client to move their email to it.

6

Ah, now I understand. So their mail service doesn’t support DKIM. Interesting. Sorry, I keep focusing on their DNS and registrar side.

7

Surprise!!
Three years later and there is no change in the way that IONOS works.
After the Fiasko that was “email made in Germany” https://www.e-mail-made-in-germany.de/, they don’t even offer basic Email safety for their customers. How could anyone want to use them for their purposes if this is the way they are doing things?
Reason i say that, is because i called for a client just for this purpose. they are not doing anything to make this possible for their customers.
Sheesh

8

I’m not surprised at all. Totally agree with your comments. IONOS do a lot of advertising here in the U.K. which attracts al out of their clients. I’m trying to move my client away from them.

9

I just spent more than an hour on the phone with their support. TL;DR: If Ionos does support DKIM, nobody in the company seems to be aware of it, and the admin UI does not contain anywhere to upload a private key. Over the course of the exceedingly painful conversation, inconsistent and often incoherent answers ranged from:

  • “We do not recommend DKIM because that is a backend security thing.”
  • “We cannot provide you a private key because it is shared hosting.”
  • “IONOS does support DKIM records, what we don’t do is provide you with the DKIM keys, or in this case guide you with this record’s configuration, unfortunately, this is out of the scope of support we offer.”
  • “You need to upgrade to a ‘Server Package’” where you “host your own server.” I was forwarded to sales, put on hold for 8 minutes, and dropped.
  • “We do not support DKIM.”
  • “All reputable email servers try to block emails that are sent from forged sender addresses. One way to verify the authenticity of the sender is to use DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), a method that allows you to digitally sign emails.” (ionos.com)
  • “IONOS does NOT support DKIM records for our own email service. This is because there is no place to setup the Private Key on the Webmail nor Control Panel. At the moment, we only provide support for the SPF which is an alternative for email authetication. There is plans to as well introduce support for DKIM records for our email service but this is not for the short-term. In case you need to have a DKIM setup for any requirement you have, we advise to choose an email service or tool that provides support for DKIM setup.”

So, good luck to anyone trying to pry a coherent sentence out of an Ionos tech support agent regarding DKIM.

10

You don’t surprise me with the comments from their support… it’s awful! I used Godaddy recently for another client and both DMARC and DKIM setup and work fine. I won’t be using Ionos again and just use Microsoft direct for my clients, especially as they are now using the reject policy correctly for DMARC

11

I found this thread while looking into the possibility of DKIM with IONOS. Realizing the thread was older but had newer information posted I figured I’d post an update that will likely help others in similar situations. The information posted as of this writing via help articles from IONOS is incorrect and nothing specifies that they support DKIM on their own hosted email. As others mentioned there isn’t anything in the admin portal for IONOS that either guides (no relevant help article) or provides the process to gain access for their own hosted email.

April 2024 update is that if you call support, and ask for DKIM for your IONOS DNS managed domain using IONOS email that they can provide the public keys for DKIM for your use. The support representative will create the DNS TXT entries for you which will have the public key.

Testing has revealed this works. hope this helps someone else in this situation.