Custom Domains & Custom Emails

Now that your Community has been customized visually, it's time to take white-labeling to the next step by hosting your community on your own sub-domain and setting up notification emails that go out to your community members from your own email!

Setting up your Custom Domain

If you want your community to be hosted on "community.yourdomain.com" instead of on "genesiv.com/app/communityname", then you'd want to set up your custom domain!

To do so, head into the Domain and Email page in your community settings.

Once there, you can begin customizing your custom domain. Provide a domain link that your server will be hosted on.

Take note of the following things when inputting your domain;

• You should be entering a subdomain, not a parent domain. For example, if your parent domain is "icecream.com", you should input "community.icecream.com", or something to that effect. Links to parent domains will not be accepted by our system.
• Do not include "www." when entering your domain.

Once you've done that, you will need to authenticate your domain. To do this, login to your domain provider (e.g. GoDaddy) and create the A record in your DNS settings. Once you've done that, input the Target/Value listed, and click on 'Click here to verify'.

If all goes smoothly, you should see it turn into a green 'Verified' text! Your community can now be accessed by heading to the domain you've specified!

After setting up your custom domain, you could encounter a delay of 1-4 hours for the SSL certificate propagation to take effect. During this period, it is normal for your custom domain to show a 'SSL certificate not found' or 'SSL certificate invalid' error message. The SSL certificate will propagate across the necessary systems within the given timeframe.

Setting up your Custom Email Configuration

Once your Custom Domain has been set up, the greyed-out portion on the right will become available to you, and you'll be able to set up your Custom Email as well!

Genesiv periodically sends out emails to community members such as our Verification emails, and 'Daily Digest' emails, which lets community members know about conversations they've missed in your community, and notification emails, that deliver members' notifications on an individual basis, such as approved requests, tags, and more!

If you've set up your Custom Email Configuration, these emails will appear in your member's inboxes from your own email, instead of Genesiv's. These emails will also be branded with your logo if your community has one uploaded.

Genesiv supports 2 types of email protocols, SMTP and Sendgrid. Let's start with setting up your custom email with SMTP.

SMTP

There are 5 required fields to set up your SMTP server:

1. SMTP host: You will need to fill this field up with the server host address, something similar to 'smtp.genesiv.com' for example.
2. SMTP port: This is the port number for your domain. (e.g 465, 587)
3. From address: This is the sender email that members will receive emails from. Remember to input your Name and Address in the following format — Name (e.g. Angel )
4. SMTP username: If you're using an Email service provider; this is simply your email address. If you're using a Custom Domain address, this can be obtained by logging in to your Domain Provider.
5. SMTP password: If you're using an Email service provider; this is simply your email password. If you're using a Custom Domain address, this can be obtained by logging in to your Domain Provider. (If you use Gmail or Google Workspaces, your SMTP password will be your Application Password instead*)
6. (Optional) Custom Headers: Include custom headers to facilitate email tracking, specify importance levels, and more!

We've listed some of the most popular SMTP Hosts and Ports below:

*For Gmail & Google Workspace Users:

If your email service provider is Gmail, or you're using Google Workspace, there is an extra step you need to follow to get your email working with your community.

To connect your Gmail with Genesiv, you'll have to first head into your Gmail settings and Create an Application Password. You can learn how to do so here. This will require you to have 2-step verification turned on for your Google account.​ Once you've created your application password, enter that into the SMTP Password field instead of your usual email password.

Once you've inputted all your values, click on 'Test Connection and Save'. Input an email address that your test email will go to, a test receiver name, and a platform name, and click send!

Once the test email has been sent successfully, your custom email should be configured and ready to go! At this point, you can choose to enable Daily Digest Emails.

Daily Digest emails are daily emails that go out to all your community members to notify them about community conversations and activities that they missed.

Sendgrid

Next, let's set up your custom email with Sendgrid.

To begin, login into your Sendgrid account. From your dashboard, navigate to Settings on the left navigation bar, and then select API Keys. Create a new API key, give it a name, select 'Full Access', and click 'Create & View'. For more information about creating a Sendgrid API key, check this out.

On Genesiv's email configuration page, input the Email address associated with the API Key, and the Sendgrid API key itself. ​

Once again, you can choose to add a header to your email if you'd like, before proceeding to click 'Test Connection and Save'.

Input an email address that your test email will go to, a test receiver name, and a platform name, and click send!

Once your Email has been verified, you can choose to turn on Daily Digest emails to give your members daily updates on missed activity in your community!