Subdomains for sending marketing emails

[Beth_Massura]

I've come across several threads on using subdomains for sending marketing emails, but they're several years old... So I thought I'd check in to see what's best practice these days.

Our IT team flagged that we have too many authorized servers in our MX record. Several are for normal corporate email, others for 3rd-party emailing systems such as Marketo. They continue to get requests from time to time from departments to add even more 3rd-party servers. They suggested subdomains (i.e. @x.company.com) be set up for the 3rd-party systems to prevent negatively impacting the "real" corporate email.

Is your company sending marketing emails from a different subdomain or not? What are the considerations/pros/cons? Does volume matter? Would we have to warm up the new subdomain like we did when we first started using Marketo?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Are you actually using branded sender domains in your instance? If not you don't need to be dealing with SPF at all.

[Beth_Massura]

Hi Sanford, we have our main domain set up in Marketo with SPF & DKIM verified. Is branded sender domains something different? I don't see anything that looks quite like this in our Email admin settings.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Send me an email to sandy@teknkl.com and I'll tell you whether you needed SPF at all.

[Beth_Massura]

Thanks, Sanford; does it need to be a real Marketo distribution to you or would a sample message suffice?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Real, please.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Did you send it?

[Beth_Massura]

You should get it shortly; thanks for your patience!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Got it. You aren't using a branded sender (= branded envelope sender domain) so you don't need Marketo's servers in your SPF record.

But you don't even have them in your SPF record now! So I don't know what your IT team could possibly be talking about with "too many authorized servers." You only have a couple of included SPF records and are nowhere near the lookup limit. Note I am speaking of chicagobooth.com.

Woopsie! Looked up the wrong domain. My original point stands, then. You may safely remove include:mktomail.com from the SPF record for chicagobooth.edu. SPF is not used to verify your Marketo emails.

[Beth_Massura]

Weird; we do have chicagobooth.edu showing SPF verified; this is the only domain we use in Marketo. When I use an SPF lookup for this domain I see a number of entries. (Was chicagobooth.com a typo?)