Your sending domain – Marketli Help

Marketing email from Marketli goes out from a subdomain of your own domain, usually mail.yourcompany.com.au. That subdomain is yours, it carries your name in the From address, and its reputation is separate from everything else your domain does.

You set it up once, under Communications → Email.

Why a subdomain and not your main domain

Your main domain is where your day to day email lives. Bulk email has a different reputation profile to the one to one email you send, and mixing them means a bad campaign can affect whether your ordinary email lands. Using mail.yourcompany.com.au keeps the two apart. If marketing email ever gets a rough reception, your normal mail is untouched.

Replies do not come back to this subdomain. You add a separate reply-to address (your real address) and that is where replies go.

Setting it up

Go to Communications → Email.
Under Sending domain, leave the subdomain as mail unless you have a reason to change it.
Enter the domain you own, without www. in front. Type yourcompany.com.au, not www.yourcompany.com.au and not mail.yourcompany.com.au. If you paste a full web address we will trim it back for you and show you what we are going to use.
Choose what appears before the @ in the From address. noreply is the default; hello or your own name works too.
Click Create sending domain.

You are then shown the DNS records to add.

The DNS records

Four records, added once at whoever manages your domain's DNS (your registrar, your web host, or Cloudflare).

Record	What it is for
TXT on `resend._domainkey.mail`	The signature that proves the email really came from you.
MX on `send.mail`	Where delivery reports come back to.
TXT on `send.mail`	Says which servers are allowed to send on your behalf.
CNAME on `links.mail`	Makes open and click tracking work.

The MX record is safe

The MX record is the one people hesitate over, and it is worth being clear: it goes on send.mail.yourcompany.com.au, a name that does not receive mail today and that nothing else uses. It cannot affect email at yourcompany.com.au. Your inbox, your team's inboxes and anything else on your main domain carry on exactly as before.

Full name or short name

DNS providers disagree about how to write the Name field, and this is the most common reason a record does not verify.

Some want the short form exactly as we show it, for example send.mail. Cloudflare, GoDaddy and most registrars work this way and add your domain for you.
Some want the full name, for example send.mail.yourcompany.com.au.

If a record will not verify, this is the first thing to check. Adding the full name in a field that expects the short name gives you send.mail.yourcompany.com.au.yourcompany.com.au, which will never work.

Copy the Value exactly as shown, including any trailing characters. Leave TTL on automatic or default.

How long verification takes

Usually a few minutes. Some providers take longer, and the outside limit is 48 hours. The page checks by itself while you wait, each record shows its own status, and Check now asks us to look again straight away.

Records can go green at different times. That is normal. You are ready to send when the whole domain shows as verified.

Opens and clicks

New sending domains have open and click tracking on from the start, which is what puts the Opened and Clicked numbers in your email history.

Opened counts a recipient loading the images in your email. It is a good signal, not an exact one: some people read with images blocked, and some privacy features load images without the person reading anything.
Clicked counts someone clicking a link in your email. To count it, links in your email are rewritten to go through links.mail.yourcompany.com.au first, which forwards the reader on to the real address instantly. That is what the CNAME record is for, and why the link a recipient sees in the status bar is not the raw destination.

If the CNAME record is not in place, the numbers simply do not appear. Nothing else breaks.

The tracking name stays with the sending domain for as long as the domain exists. It can be pointed somewhere else later but not taken away, because links in emails you have already sent still travel through it. Removing the sending domain removes it too.

A word on DMARC

DMARC is a policy record at your main domain that tells inbox providers what to do with mail that fails these checks. Whether to publish one, and how strict to make it, is the domain owner's call, so we do not add or change anything at your main domain.

Where your email is sent from

New sending domains are hosted in Tokyo, which is the closest region to Australia and the one your Sent from Tokyo line in settings refers to. It affects the servers that send your email, not where anything is stored on your behalf, and it is fixed when the domain is created.

Removing it

Remove on the sending domain takes it out of Marketli and you stop being able to send marketing email until you set one up again. You can delete the DNS records afterwards. Emails you have already sent are kept in your history.