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New Participant
February 13, 2019
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Subdomains for sending marketing emails

  • February 13, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 9567 views

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?

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Best answer by SanfordWhiteman

You should get it shortly; thanks for your patience!


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.

1 reply

SanfordWhiteman
New Participant
February 13, 2019

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

New Participant
February 13, 2019

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
New Participant
February 13, 2019

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