A custom email header is an invisible header included in every campaign and automation email you create. It is a piece of information that appears on the source of an email. This header is not visible to your contacts. The header can be used for internal verification, tracking contacts, bouncing contacts, and more.
For example, let’s say you are sending a campaign to 10,000 internal employees using ActiveCampaign. You have a rule set up on your own email system to identify all messages coming from the ActiveCampaign platform and sort them accordingly. You would want to create a custom header that includes the following:
Source: ActiveCampaign - %EMAIL%
Then, when you receive an email from ActiveCampaign, your receiving email server can read the custom header and sort the email.
To set up your custom email header:
- Click Contacts on the left menu.
- Click Custom Email Headers under Manage.
The next page will look like this: - Type the name of your header in the "Name" field. Note that this is an internal name and is only for your reference.
- Next, type the header into the "Header Information" field. For the purposes of this article, we're going to type "Source."
- In the next field, enter the header value.
In this example, we want to identify messages coming from ActiveCampaign. To do that, we're going to type "ActiveCampaign -" and then click the “Insert Personalization Tag” option to select the personalization tag for email address.
Here's what our header looks like with everything filled out: - Click the list this header will apply to to select it.
- When finished, click the “Add” button.
Your custom email header will be listed on the custom email header page:
To add additional headers, click the “Add” button and follow the same steps above.