How to set up DKIM on Bluehost

Setting up DKIM on Bluehost comes down to two moves: get the selector and the public key from whoever runs your mailboxes, then publish that key as a DNS record wherever your domain’s DNS is answered. The record comes first on this page because a person who can read one can tell a good paste from a broken one.

Bluehost is the DNS host for domains registered or hosted there, and it publishes the DKIM record in the domain’s DNS. It does not generate the DKIM key or the selector; whoever runs the mailboxes does that.

What DKIM proves, and where the key has to live

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) puts a signature on each message sent from your domain. The mail platform signs with a private key it keeps to itself. The receiving server pulls the selector out of the DKIM-Signature header, looks up <selector>._domainkey.yourdomain.com in DNS, and checks the signature against the public key it finds there. A match tells the receiver two things: the message came from a system holding your private key, and nobody changed the body or the signed headers on the way.

That lookup is why the record goes where your DNS lives. Receivers don’t ask your mail platform for the key, and they don’t ask your registrar unless it happens to run the zone. They ask whichever nameservers your domain delegates to, and only the copy held there counts. The DKIM guide covers the check from the receiver’s side; this page covers the publishing side.

Two parties share the record and neither can do the other’s part. The mail platform generates the key pair inside its own console, keeps the private half, signs outgoing mail with it, and hands you the public half plus a selector. The DNS host publishes what you paste and has no way to invent a value that would verify.

Bluehost publishes only the record the reader enters by hand, in the exact host, type and value fields chosen at the console. Where the mailboxes are Bluehost email itself, Bluehost may already have added its own DKIM record, in which case there is nothing left to add.

The record, tag by tag

Most platforms hand you a TXT record. Its value is a short run of tags separated by semicolons, and a typical one begins v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p= followed by the key. v=DKIM1 names the version and, when present, has to come first. k=rsa names the key type; k=ed25519 exists, and a platform that supports it will say so. p= carries the public key itself, hundreds of characters of base64 with no spaces, and it’s the one tag a receiver insists on.

Three optional tags matter. t=y marks the key as testing, so receivers treat a failed signature as if the message carried none. t=s says the identity in the signature has to be your domain itself, with no subdomain in front of it. h=sha256 limits the hash to the algorithm receivers use anyway.

Start with the value as your platform issued it, character for character, and don’t tidy it. Once mail is flowing, tighten in two places. If t=y is present, remove it so a failure counts as a failure. If the platform offers a 2048-bit key alongside a 1024-bit one, pick 2048, since it’s the length platforms now issue by default and receivers accept it.

Rotation stays the platform’s job: when it issues a new key under a new selector, you publish the new record and leave the old one up until nothing signs with it any more.

Some platforms give you a CNAME instead. The name is still <selector>._domainkey, and the target is a host on the platform’s own servers that holds the TXT value, which lets the platform rotate keys without you touching DNS again. If you were given a CNAME, publish a CNAME. Converting the target into a TXT record publishes a hostname where receivers expect a key.

The selector is the half people underrate. A receiver builds its lookup from the s= tag in the header, so the name you publish has to match the one the platform signs with, letter for letter. selector1 and selector2 are different keys, and so are mail and mail1. For DMARC alignment the d= in the signature also has to be your domain or a subdomain of it.

Confirm who answers DNS for your domain

A record saved in a console that your domain doesn’t delegate to is invisible to receivers, whatever that console reports.

Sign in to the Bluehost account, open Domains, select the domain, and check the Nameservers section. If it shows Bluehost’s nameservers, the record belongs at Bluehost, and adding it there is the right move. If the nameservers point at another host, such as Cloudflare or the mail provider itself, the record has to go there instead.

Add the record in Bluehost

Copy both pieces from the platform’s DKIM or email authentication page and keep that tab open until the check at the end passes. Laid out the way Bluehost expects it, the record looks like this:

v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=[long key value from the mail provider]

Set Type to TXT for a Google Workspace or generic provider key, or to CNAME for the two Microsoft 365 records. Put only the selector, such as google._domainkey, selector1._domainkey or selector2._domainkey, in Host Record, because Bluehost appends the domain itself. Put the TXT key in TXT Value or the CNAME target in Points To, and leave TTL on the default.

1. Sign in to the Bluehost account.
2. Go to Domains, select the domain, and open its DNS settings, labelled DNS, DNS Records or Manage.
3. Find the DNS records list and click Add Record.
4. Set Type to TXT for most providers, or CNAME for Microsoft 365.
5. In the Host Record field, enter only the selector, for example google._domainkey or selector1._domainkey, with no domain name added on the end.
6. For a TXT record, paste the long key value beginning v=DKIM1; into the TXT Value field.
7. For a CNAME record, paste the target host the provider gave, ending in onmicrosoft.com, into Points To.
8. Leave TTL on the default.
9. Click Save, and for Microsoft 365 repeat the same steps for the second selector.

Before you save, compare the last few characters of the pasted value with the platform’s page, because a copy that stops early publishes a key that will never verify, and the console won’t warn you. Check the selector in the name against the platform’s page in the same pass.

A few traps are specific to Bluehost:

• Entering the full host in Host Record breaks the record. If the provider shows google._domainkey.yourdomain.com, typing that whole string at Bluehost produces google._domainkey.yourdomain.com.yourdomain.com, because Bluehost appends the domain on its own.
• The key is long, running to hundreds of characters, so a truncated paste, a stray space or an inserted line break breaks validation.
• Do not add quotation marks around the value. Bluehost handles quoting on its own, and typed quote characters corrupt the record.
• Matching the type matters. Google Workspace supplies a TXT record and Microsoft 365 supplies two CNAME records, and entering the wrong type means the key never validates.
• Publishing the record at Bluehost is not the last step everywhere. Google Workspace requires a return to its own console to start signing once the record resolves.

Save, then wait, then check

The change can take minutes up to a couple of hours before the mail provider can confirm the key, and the saved record appears back in the same DNS records list at Bluehost once Save has run.

Once the record shows in the console, run the free scan against your domain. It asks DNS for the selector the way a receiving server does and tells you in plain words whether the key is published and readable.

A second check closes the loop. Send a message from the domain to a mailbox you control and open the Authentication-Results header. dkim=pass with your domain in header.d= means the signature verified against the key you published. dkim=fail or dkim=none with the record in place points at the selector or at the platform side, and the next section says where to look.

When the key is missing or malformed

Without a record at the selector, the receiver gets no key and the message carries no verified signature. It won’t bounce on that alone, though DMARC then has only SPF to lean on, and SPF breaks on forwarding, so the quote a customer forwards to a colleague arrives with neither.

A malformed record fails in the same quiet way: a p= value cut short, a stray space or line break in the middle, a doubled host such as mail._domainkey.yourdomain.com.yourdomain.com, or a selector that’s off by one character, and the receiver logs dkim=fail or dkim=permerror and moves on. You hear nothing unless DMARC reports are arriving, and the DMARC piece shows how those reports expose a DKIM failure per sending source.

The census shows how ordinary that silence is. Of the 75,823,110 domains where the September 2026 census could run the DKIM check, it found a key at a known selector on 37,999,462 (50.1%). That check works the way any checker does: there’s no way to list the DKIM records on a domain, so it can only ask for selectors it knows to try, and a platform with an unusual selector can read as absent when the key is fine.

If your scan reports nothing found while the record sits in the console, finding your DKIM selector shows how to read the live selector out of a sent message’s headers before you change anything.

Work a failure in order: the selector spelling first, the nameservers second, then the tail of the pasted value, then whether the platform still needs you to switch signing on.

Figures as of 5 September 2026, from the September 2026 edition of the defaults.exposed census. Census numbers move every month; the current values are on the census data page.