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]

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.

[Incynthia_Truon]

@SanfordWhiteman 

Might be a silly question to confirm but..How can i tell if my emails are being sent from a branded sender? I think our general setup doesnt enforce the branded domain but how do i know for sure when i send a formal email to myself. When sending a a formal test email to myself i see the email sender as just whomever i set as the reply name/email. 

Additinally, when using subdomains as the sender/reply to, would this impact email deliverability? 

Thanks in advance!

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Additinally, when using subdomains as the sender/reply to, would this impact email deliverability? 

Only for the better.

[Incynthia_Truon]

Thank you! I inspected the email header and the it looks like it isn't using the branded domain we had in place in marketo. Phew! 

Thanks again!

[SanfordWhiteman]

The X-Mailfrom is a subdomain of mktomail.com, then?

[Kim_Wieczner]

Hello! We're running into the same resistance from our IT department wanting us to set up our SPF and DKIM in Marketo under a subdomain. However, in doing this and therefore sending with the "from" email address as that subdomain, we have A) flagged concern with customers wondering if the email is legitimate and B) limited our ability to send on behalf of salespeople using send from sales owner/account owner functionality. 

We do not have a branded sender or dedicated IP so in reading this, I'm interpreting that we should be able to adjust our configuration to be able to go back to sending from our core email domain. 

I'm not sure exactly how to follow your instructions about essentially ignoring the SPF settings when setting up in Marketo admin. Can you clarify what we should be inputting for our DKIM/SPF settings given this case? We still want to make sure DMARC etc are working properly to allow us to land in inboxes. 

Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman]

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I'm not sure exactly how to follow your instructions about essentially ignoring the SPF settings when setting up in Marketo admin. Can you clarify what we should be inputting for our DKIM/SPF settings given this case? We still want to make sure DMARC etc are working properly to allow us to land in inboxes.

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Add example.com in Admin » Email.

Don’t put anything in the SPF record for example.com.

For DKIM, the Admin section gives you the public key to publish as a DNS TXT record at m1._domainkey.example.com.

[SanfordWhiteman]

The envelope sender info isn't visible unless you inspect the headers.

And even those are not 100% reliable (only server logs are) but in this particular case you can look at the X-Mailfrom header.

[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?)

[SanfordWhiteman]

And if your IT is confused, I explained it all in this post a couple of years ago:https://blog.teknkl.com/your-marketo-spf-entry-doesnt-matter-unless-youre-paying-extra/

[Beth_Massura]

Thank you; this was really helpful! I'll be asking our rep about branded sender domains to understand the use case for them better.

[SanfordWhiteman]

See my edited post above. Unsuccessfully multitasking while on a conf call.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Real, please.