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• Bulk Mail will be designated with an “mb.” prefix – mb.publicationABrandA.com

  • Bulk mail is your marketing mail, sent to prospects and in some cases paid subscribers. Bulk mail makes up the bulk of your mail volume.

• Transactional mail will be designated with an “mt.” prefix – mt.publicationABrandA.com

  • Transactional mail is any mail related directly to a transaction: these are confirmations, receipts, renewal notices, and similar. There should be no marketing content in transactional email.

• Paid Mail will be designated with an “mp.” prefix – mp.publicationABrandA.com

  • Paid mail includes any publication that requires a purchase or subscription to receive. These are the exclusive members-only type emails and alerts.

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Domain Alignment and Deliverability

This is where I’m going to write a section about the importance of domain alignment for DMARC/SPF.

Further Reading

This is where I’m putting some links to resources people can read about domain strategy.

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The primary control to observe and restrict email domain usage is DMARC. Alignment is at the heart of DMARC; without a firm understanding of it, you may fall victim to a stalled-out project or inadvertently and unknowingly block legitimate email.

In its simplest explanation, alignment refers to the relationship between what humans see in the “from” address and what the inbound machinery reads from the header portion of the email when checking domains in the DKIM and SPF record. 

Alignment requires that the “from” domain match either of the domains used in DKIM or SPF. Only emails that are aligned can pass DMARC. The 14 West Deliverability and IT teams work collaboratively to ensure correct alignment.

An illustrated example, via dmarcian:

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The process of aligning your email proves to the outside world that a particular vendor or server has been explicitly authorized to send on your organization’s behalf. The big picture is that once you’ve aligned all of the mail you do want delivered, you can instruct email receivers to discard anything that you haven’t approved. Without alignment, degrees of uncertainty are introduced when an email receiver is attempting to confirm the origin and trustworthiness of a message.

Your ultimate goal is to reach as close to 100% alignment as possible with each of your email vendors and then publish an increasingly restrictive DMARC policy of p=quarantine and p=reject.

Further Reading

• https://www.litmus.com/blog/email-subdomains/

• https://blog.hive.co/everything-you-need-to-know-about-email-subdomains/

• https://help.activecampaign.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017633519-Subdomains-and-deliverability

• https://www.mailgun.com/blog/the-basics-of-email-subdomains/

• https://dmarcian.com/alignment/

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Related FAQS

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