Sending email from your own domain
Email that comes from your own address gets read. Email from a generic sender gets filed as junk. Setting this up is three DNS records and one wait, and it is the single biggest thing you can do for whether your email arrives.
The short version
- Open Email Settings on the Campaigns page, or the domain's Email tab under Domains.
- Create the three records we show you, at your registrar.
- Wait. Records usually take minutes to spread, sometimes a few hours.
- Nothing sends until they are verified, and that is on purpose.
- If you bought your domain here, this is much simpler.
Why this is needed at all
Anybody can put your address in the From line of an email. That is how the protocol works, and it is why receiving mail servers are suspicious by default.
The records prove that mail sent on your behalf really is authorized by you. Without them your campaigns land in spam or are rejected outright, and there is nothing we can do about that from our side.
Setting it up
The domain you send from has to be in your Domains and pointed at one of your sites. Open its Email tab and choose Turn on email sending. We show you exactly which records to create, with a copy button on each one, and what to paste where.
Create them at whoever runs your domain's DNS. If you bought the domain through us, that is us: we add the records for you, and there is far less to do.
Then wait, and use Check my records. As with a website domain, a check reflects what your own connection can see, so a fresh record can look wrong for a while after you make it.
If your domain has no DMARC record, the tab also suggests a starter one. It is optional and changes nothing about how your mail is treated, but Gmail and Yahoo expect one from anyone sending in volume.
Why nothing sends until it is verified
We do not let you send from an unverified domain: a campaign's From address has to end in a domain whose records are verified. That looks strict and it is protecting you.
Mail sent before the records are in place does not just fail; it teaches the receiving mail servers that your domain sends unauthenticated mail. That reputation follows you, and it is much harder to repair than it is to avoid.
What we do and do not track
We record whether an email was opened. We do not track which links people click, at all.
Click tracking works by rewriting every link in your email to point at a tracking server first. That makes your links look wrong to a suspicious recipient and costs you another DNS record, and we decided the numbers were not worth either.
Keeping your sending reputation
Send to people who asked to hear from you. That is the whole of it, and no amount of configuration substitutes for it.
We watch bounce and complaint rates and pause bulk sending if either gets high. That is a protection rather than a punishment: a domain that keeps sending to bad addresses gets its reputation ruined, and by the time you notice, your ordinary mail is going to spam too.
If it happens, the Campaigns page says your campaigns are on hold and why. Mail your site sends, like password resets and order confirmations, keeps going, unless spam complaints get so high that we have to stop all mail from the domain. Either way, choose Contact Us on that notice: we will look at what happened with you and start your campaigns again. Cleaning up List Health first makes that quicker.
Bounces and unsubscribes are handled for you
Addresses that bounce or unsubscribe are suppressed automatically and stay suppressed. You do not have to clean your list by hand, and you cannot accidentally mail somebody who opted out. Likely typos, throwaway inboxes and domains that no longer take email are skipped too; List Health, under Lists, shows them all.