topic Re: Email sending domain and email setup in general in Email Deliverability

Email sending domain and email setup in general

EmilyRivera — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 03:15:19 GMT

Hi all - I think I (together with a fairly uninformed HubSpot support rep) am making this way more complicated than it needs to be. At least, it's way more complicated than any other CRM that I've connected to email in the past, even Salesforce.

We are hoping to set up so that we can send marketing emails with a simple format of name@company.com. The company's corporate email platform is MS365, and everything currently works perfectly. They also use MailChimp which works fine with that format.

The HS support rep talked about setting up a subdomain as the email sending domain for tracking. Sounded good, so we created the DNS record as hsemail.company.com. (As well as a separate DNS record for the brand/primary domains.)

(I also get that segregating HS email to a subdomain can help - but only a tiny bit from what I've read - to reduce any negative reputation impact on the main domain.)

Anyway, I figured that once we setup email and prepared to send our first campaign, we'd connect/authenticate somehow, so that we could then send from (and have replies come back to) the name@company.com format. It appears that we can only send from name@hsemail.company.com, so obviously that email sending domain is not only a tracking domain as I was told.

This is all starting to make sense to me, but now with all of the different information I've been given, I'm worried about just using company.com as the email domain, and adding DNS records to support that - especially because they also use MailChimp.

I see the "Manage your email authentication..." article and a couple others, but some of that conflicts with what the HS support rep told me, so I'm afraid to do anything right now.

Any thoughts or resources would be very much appreciated!

Re: Email sending domain and email setup in general

Jnix284 — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 11:34:41 GMT

Hi @EmilyRivera I'm sorry you've gotten unclear information about how to manage your email sending domain.

You're right, using a subdomain can be one strategy for protecting a domain's reputation, but if you're doing things with the right intent, that shouldn't be necessary.

You can connect your domain directly to HubSpot as an email sending domain, allowing you to send and receive emails - all you need to do is update the DKIM and DMARC records.

SPF record is where there is conflicting information, HubSpot is including the correct information in the email envelope, so adding an additional SPF for your domain isn't necessary.

Once you have your email sending domain configured, you can send a marketing email using https://www.learndmarc.com/ to verify everything is properly configured.

Re: Email sending domain and email setup in general

EmilyRivera — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 17:06:17 GMT

Thanks for taking the time to answer, I really appreciate it. Most of this was more related to their existing email setup and DNS than HubSpot I suppose, so your answer makes sense to me.

I think that if support didn't send me down that certain path, I wouldn't have made it so difficult and confused myself... But again, thanks very much, this was helpful.

Re: Email sending domain and email setup in general

Jnix284 — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 17:48:20 GMT

you're welcome @EmilyRivera happy to help!

Re: Email sending domain and email setup in general

EVaughanRCA — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:35:49 GMT

Hey Hubspot Community... My team and I have just started building email campaigns and marketing flyers. Our first time sending them out, we noticed how spammy they look when they arrive in our client's emal inboxes. We use Names.Co.Uk as our domain, and that is currently connected to Squarespace, but I also need it to connect to Hubspot. However, we use gmail for email sending... is it possible to connect free gmail to hubspot email sending?

If not, is there anything I can do?