Email Deliverability and Tainted Branded Domains

[Anonymous]

After doing some digging around and searching online and here the community, I am still not feeling like I getting my question answered. I am sure there is a better way to search this out, just not aware of it.

Getting to the point, our deliverability has been spotty at best until about 4 months ago. We switched our sender domain from the standard "mycompany.com" to a subdomain "email.mycompany.io" and we seem to be getting into the upper 90s on percentage delivered (we've even seen 99.7% on one campaign to around 5,000 leads). We also have added more filtering to send only to those showing proof of life and are engaged, opened and email and/or visited web page, etc. However, with that being said, prior to this being the case, there was some talk of moving our marketing assets hosted on Marketo landing pages or even external landing pages to a new branded domain using Marketo's feature of adding or replacing domains in tandem with the new email subdomain.

Basically, email is sent from "email.mycompany.io" and the thought is that our assets would move from "pages.mycompany.com" to "[something].mycompany.com."

The question is really two-fold: If the theory is that "pages." is a tainted asset domain, can adding a link containing that domain in an email affect the deliverability, are we likely to hit the SPAM folder? Also, will a move from "pages." to "[something]." really improve the deliverability of emails when using a link to the new asset subdomain?

I hope I am making sense.

thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Can including a blacklisted domain, or subdomain or hostname of a blacklisted domain, in the body get your email blacklisted? Yes!

Does changing to a different subdomain of the same domain change the outcome? No. URIBLs operate on the shortest private suffix (i.e. registered domain).

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply.

So in short, the prefix does not matter. It is not a separate entity being treated any differently by the servers than the root registered domain. I am trying to make a case that this transfer of assets to a new subdomain is not necessary. Our registered domain is quite healthy, so no matter the prefix, if the root is bad, the whole thing is bad.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Right. Think about how easy it is to create a hostname in DNS (or have a wildcard entry so you don't even need to add one). It can't be that easy to avoid blacklisting.

The sole exception is when an otherwise innocent domain owner lets users (tenants) create subdomains and some of those of those are spammers. Sometimes the main domain can avoid blacklisting for a time... but eventually they are seen as spammer-friendly and blacklisted too.