Subdomains for sending marketing emails

[SanfordWhiteman]

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

[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.

[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]

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.

[SanfordWhiteman]

---

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]

---

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.

---

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.