Sending domains

A sending domain is a domain you are allowed to put in the From address of a campaign. The Sending domains screen is where you add one, see the DNS records it needs, and check whether those records are currently passing. When you finish this page you will know which domain to send from and what its status is telling you.

Add a domain#

Go to Sending domains and add the domain. Enter the bare domain or subdomain, with no protocol and no mailbox: example.com or news.example.com, not https://example.com.

Once added, the screen shows the DNS records that domain needs. Publishing and verifying those records is covered step by step in Authenticate your domain. Adding the domain here and publishing the records are two separate acts, and mail is not authenticated until the second one is done.

Use a domain you control#

The domain in your From address should be one whose DNS you can edit. In practice that means your own business domain or a subdomain of it.

Sending marketing mail with a From address at a free mailbox provider, such as a gmail.com or yahoo.com address, does not work for bulk sending. Those providers publish strict DMARC policies for their own domains. A message sent through any third party while claiming to come from an address at one of them fails DMARC alignment, and receivers act on the published policy by rejecting it or filing it as spam. This is not a restriction of this product. It is the mailbox provider protecting its own users' addresses from being used by anyone else, and it applies to every sending platform.

The same logic applies to a domain a partner or client owns. If you cannot publish DNS records on it, you cannot authenticate it, so do not send from it.

Verification status#

Each domain on the screen shows whether its records are currently found and valid. Read it as a live check rather than a one-time flag: it reflects what is in DNS at the moment you look, not what was there when you set the domain up.

A domain that was verified and is no longer verified means something changed in DNS. The usual causes, in order of likelihood:

• Somebody added a second SPF record for a different service. A domain may have only one, and a second one breaks SPF for everything.
• A record was deleted during unrelated DNS work, such as a website migration or a nameserver change.
• The DKIM record was edited or truncated, often by a control panel that reformats long values.

Re-check the values against what the screen shows before changing anything. A verification failure is more often a missing or duplicated record than a wrong one.

If a domain has never verified since you added it, and the values are right, the cause is usually propagation delay or a host field entered in the format your DNS provider did not expect. Both are covered in the troubleshooting section of Authenticate your domain.

Use a subdomain for marketing mail#

For most senders the right answer is to send campaigns from a subdomain, not from the domain that carries your ordinary business correspondence.

If your company is example.com and your staff email each other and their customers at example.com, send marketing from something like news.example.com or mail.example.com instead. The From address then reads hello@news.example.com.

The reason is separation of reputation. Sending reputation accrues largely at the domain level. A subdomain builds its own history, so a bad marketing send, a stale list, or a spike in complaints affects the subdomain rather than the domain your invoices and support replies go out on. Without that separation, one bad campaign can make your ordinary business email harder to deliver, which is a far more expensive problem than a filtered newsletter.

Practical notes on choosing one:

• Pick a name a human reads as yours. news.example.com and mail.example.com are fine. Random strings look like something a spammer generated.
• Keep it stable. The reputation you build belongs to that exact subdomain. Rotating subdomains to escape a reputation problem is a pattern filters recognize, and it resets you to zero history each time.
• Authenticate it in its own right. A subdomain needs its own records. It does not inherit SPF or DKIM from the parent domain.
• One subdomain is usually enough. Splitting further, such as a separate subdomain per campaign type, divides your volume and makes each one look smaller and less established than it is.

If you send transactional mail as well as marketing mail, separating those two onto different subdomains is worth doing, because transactional mail is the traffic you least want caught by a marketing reputation problem.

Several domains on one account#

You can add more than one sending domain, which is what an agency or a multi-brand business needs. Each domain is authenticated separately and carries its own reputation, so a problem on one client's domain does not follow the others.

When you build a campaign, the From address decides which domain's reputation is at stake. Check it before sending, particularly if you have several brands in one account and the list default was set some time ago.