Email Domain Configuration And Best Practices

Published on 2020-05-27· Updated on 2023-09-04

Setting up and configuring your email domain to be primed for sending emails is one of the overlooked aspects of email delivery. Since email delivery is one of the first things that come into people's minds while sending emails, tweaking the email domain in a certain way will provide much better benefits in the long run.

Your email domain matters since that defines your identity in the email ecosystem. Also, the domain name you use when sending an email, your email activities are monitored being associated with this domain. 

In this tutorial, you will be guided on how to prime your domain for better email delivery. Here you will find ways you can make it more secure and easy for you to avoid problems with email deliveries in the future.

FAQ

Create a custom domain

Instead of the free domain or gmail.com, use the custom domain. Just imagine getting a promotional email from a mail address with the domain name as google.com or yahoo, would it make a good impression? Most of the emails without a professional domain and a free domain would be avoided by the organizations and people with personal Ids.

Custom domains also provide you to have control over the customization of your brand, and your brand image is essential. Since you have control over your domain settings, it will unlock various options for you, such as Subdomains, Email authentications, Setting up custom envelope domains using a subdomain.

For your reference:

[email protected]? - No

[email protected]? - No

[email protected]? - No

[email protected]? - Yes

Use multiple subdomains to send emails

The domain through which you send your emails is the unique identifier of the email message you sent. Now, sending emails from multiple subdomains has no effect on email deliverability. It's okay if you don't want a subdomain. If you are a relatively small organization with a set number of audiences to reach and a fixed marketing plan, it is often preferred to send emails with a single domain.

Even for a large organization, it is not imperative to send an email with different subdomains for better email delivery.

But if you are a large organization that sends emails to different range of people and with your various services then yes you can use subdomains. Let us take an example let suppose you have a domain "@erza.com" now If you are sending offers to the existing customers you will send by subdomain "@offers.erza.com", If you want to send some notifications to your clients you use "@notifications.erza.com".

Now, why would you want to create several subdomains when one emails for good email deliveries? The first thing is email domains have their reputation assigned to it, and this reputation defines how easy it would be to deliver emails to the ISP's inbox. It's important to segregate your emails from different subdomains to divide your domain reputations according to the emails you send.

You might be sending transactional and marketing from your organization but will since transactional and marketing emails generally have significantly different open rates. Transactional emails are logically the most opened ones, and while marketing emails differ from person to person. The difference is not only in the open rates but in the purpose too. Thus we need to segregate their domain reputation such that they won't affect each other.

Here are some examples for your reference:

[email protected] - For Transactional Emails

[email protected] - For Product Emails

[email protected] - For Marketing Emails

Implement Email Authentication:

SPF (Sender Policy Framework)

With SFP you can specify the number of email IPs allowed to send the emails through the domain. This is a form of authentication process which assures the Receiver of the emails that the email was sent from an authorized mail server.

Even though your emails are verified through the SPF, it is not guaranteed that the emails failing the SFP authentication will be rejected. As for what to do when validation fails, it is decided by the receiving email service. Different ISPs and ESPs have their own way of dealing with the SPF authentication failure and have their own policies in place for that. 

Sending emails even though your SPF is possible but is recommended to be added as an email security feature.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)

This is a kind of email authentication achieved by public and private key cryptography. DKIM verification further validates the email is from the verified IP and also provides a way to detect. The validation uses the public key and private key to decrypt the email signature content and verify the credentials.

Again the action against DKIM failure differs depending on the email services and their respective policies which you should check out before sending emails to them.

Note:- Nowadays most of the email service provided recommends implementing the SPF and DKIM implementation to improve the security of the emails and prevent email tampering. DMARC, although a bit newer validation method is being accepted by many major ISPs as the third validation.

DMARC ( Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance)

DMARC uses the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) to check email authentication. It is used for Protection from Email Spoofing, phishing, and brand abuse by preventing domain impersonification. It also provides a method for detecting, reporting, and acting upon any validation misses back to you.

The email failure handling in DMARC is set by the policy set in the DMARC. This policy defines whether your email should be Rejected, Reported or no action should be taken on the failing DMARC authentication.

Envelope From Domain Setup

This is the reply back ore bounce back address where failed or bounced emails are returned back to, also known as the return path. Now your form address and envelope address are independent of each other and you can have different envelope domains from the from-domain. 

But an envelope domain that contradicts the domain should be avoided if you are using DMARC authentication. The DMARC checks email validity by matching envelope domain with the from the domain, if they don't align properly, the DMARC validation will fail.

Lets's take a look at an example:

Form-address: [email protected]

Envelope-address: [email protected]

instead of [email protected]

Brand your from-name

Now this one is not directly related to the domain name, but this indirectly compliments your domain since your domain is your brand.

Using your brand name in the form-name credential gives the recipient a clearer picture of whom the mail is being sent and gives a kind of authenticity in the eyes of the person opening the email. This actually makes the recipient less likely to add your domain to the spam and might also improve open or click rates.

I assume if you are referencing this tutorial, you want to send emails that are mostly related to marketing and promotion. For people sending these kinds of emails, you should avoid sending from addresses as "no-repy@domain.com"

Conclusion

You can do more with your domain to assist you with the email deliveries, it may be because you want to improve your deliverability, improve security, or maybe you want to be safe from blacklisting and keep open options. These recommendations will help you with your email marketing.

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Hitesh Pandey💻

Full Stack Developer, Pepipost

🥑 Developer Evangelist | 🥇Email Geek

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