Sending Emplifi Emails Under Your Domain

The Emplifi Ratings & Reviews ESP, SendGrid, can send email through your domain. This allows SendGrid to use your domain in the sender email address, a process called sender authentication. To your customers, these "white label" emails appear to come from you. In addition to branding the sender email address, this process also provides deliverability benefits by proving to ISPs that you own the domain and control the IP you're sending from.

The best practice is to use a different subdomain.domain combo for different email types (such as marketing versus transactional emails). If you send marketing emails over the http://yourstore.com domain, then it makes sense to send transactional emails over a unique subdomain, such as notifications.yourstore.com.

Requirements

Sender authentication requires that you select two subdomains that your company is not using for any other purpose:

• Domain authentication and reverse DNS -- for example, ttmail.yourstore.com

• Link branding -- for example, tttrack.yourstore.com

Domain (Return-Path) authentication

To use your own "from" address without decreasing deliverability, the domain in the Return-Path header of the email must match the "from" address domain.

The Return-Path is not displayed when the email is viewed, but it is used by the underlying email delivery services. If the domains of the Return-Path and "from" address are different, this is considered suspicious. Some email services may block the email or classify it as junk.

The Return-Path domain cannot be a top-level domain, but its top-level domain should match the top-level domain of the "from" address.

Consider these scenarios:

Suggested subdomain name

Unless your business needs dictate otherwise, use ttmail as the subdomain. For example, if your top-level domain is http://yourstore.com , use ttmail.yourstore.com for domain authentication.

DNS details

To support domain authentication, three CNAME records need to be created in your company's DNS.

For example, for http://yourstore.com the DNS records would be similar to this:

In the above example, "12345.678" is a client-specific key. The key generated for use with your domains will be different. Emplifi will provide you with the exact entries to use for your DNS.

Reverse DNS

Reverse DNS, sometimes called IP address white labeling, is similar to domain authentication but operates at a lower level. The idea is to use a dedicated IP address as the sending address of your email, and to add a DNS record so that the dedicated IP address is associated with your domain.

Your email reputation and deliverability can benefit from this setup, for two reasons. One, the dedicated IP address cannot be used by any other email sender whose reputation might affect yours. Two, some email delivery services compare the domain of the IP address with the Return-Path and/or "from" address domain as part of their spam detection.

Subdomain name

Use the same subdomain for reverse DNS as you use for domain authentication. For example, ttmail.yourstore.com.

DNS details

Emplifi will provide you with information to add an A record to add to your DNS.

For example, for http://yourstore.com the DNS record might be:

In the above table, o1.ttmail.yourstore.com is the rDNS (Reverse DNS) lookup for the dedicated IP address 123.45.67.89. Email sent with this IP address will be automatically associated with ttmail.yourstore.com.

Link branding for email content

Branding links in the content of your emails can also benefit your email deliverability. Emails from one domain which contain links to another domain can raise red flags with email delivery services.

Link branding automatically rewrites Emplifi Ratings & Reviews links in your emails to point to a subdomain of your company's domain, which in turn will redirect to Emplifi Ratings & Reviews for proper tracking and handling.

Suggested subdomain name

Your link branding subdomain should be different from your domain authentication subdomain. Unless your business needs dictate otherwise, use tttrack as the subdomain. For example, if your top-level domain is http://yourstore.com , use tttrack.yourstore.com for link branding.

DNS details

For link branding, two more CNAME records need to be created in your company's DNS.

For example, for http://yourstore.com the DNS records would be similar to this:

In the above example, "111222333" is a client-specific key which would be different for your domain. Emplifi will provide you with the exact entries to use for your DNS.