What is it?#
A Custom Sender Name & Email lets you specify the display name and email address when emails are sent out from your Network Site. It's what recipients see in the From field of the email.
A number of different emails are sent to members from a Network Site:
- Transactional emails eg notifications, reset password, event registrations, purchase
- Broadcast emails ie Digest Mails, Service Mails, Announcement mails
Normally these emails are sent from the MainCross sender name and email. You can replace the default MainCross ones with your own.
Using a Custom Sender Name & Email makes it more likely for your emails to be delivered and for recipients to trust and open the mail when they recognize your familiar and trusted brand.
You can contact us to enable your network for sending emails from your domain. The process is is quite involved - we need to do perform the setup at our end at multiple email providers that we use, and you need to make some DNS settings and optionally setup a mailbox.
Setup costs a one time fee for the Starter Plan. Higher plans can request this free of charge.
How it works#
Say your Network Site is at networksite.com.
- Transactional mails will go out from your primary or root domain
- Broadcast mails will go out from a subdomain (m1.networksite.com)
Broadcast mails go out in bulk and can easily damage your domain's sending reputation or even get your domain blacklisted. We recommend using a subdomain for sending broadcast mails to potentially isolate the primary domain.
Once setup is complete:
- Transactional emails (Tx) will go out from Display Name 1 <[email protected]>
- The Reply-to email address will be the same as [email protected]
- It is highly recommended to have a mailbox at [email protected], to catch bounced emails or replies, etc
- If you don't want to setup another mailbox at additional cost, your may use an existing email ID
- Broadcast emails (Bx) will go out from Display Name 2 <[email protected]>
- The Reply-to email address will be the same email ID as the Tx path, ie [email protected], thus avoiding the need and charge for an additional mailbox.
Send us your chosen Custom Sender Name & Email
We need these details for Tx and Bx mails:
- Display name 1 & 2
- localpart1 & localpart2
Update your DNS
Once we receive the above information, we will send you multiple DNS records that you need to add to your existing DNS records.
Do NOT delete any existing DNS records.
Once that's complete, our support personnel will confirm if everything is working, else, they can help you troubleshoot.
Perils of a new subdomain for bulk mail#
When a new sub domain is first used for sending mail, especially bulk mail, email services need to be trained in receiving mail from this domain, so that they don't treat it as spam or junk. Microsoft (Outlook.com, Office365) is especially over prone to treating every new domain as spammy. Many organizations also filter mails from domains they have not seen before - these may be silently dropped as spam, or the organization may inform the recipient that the mail was withheld and can be manually released using their internal IT system, etc.
We will slowly ramp up sending from this new domain over a period of 2 weeks until we are confident that bulk mails can be delivered successfully.
Please check with a sample of the members if they have received the bulk mail in their inbox.
