SFMC SAP, its SPF and DKIM and impact on different verified email addresses

Question

Let’s say I have the following subdomain registered for the SAP:

email.domainxyz.com

This subdomain will have both SPF and DKIM authentication methods.

What happens if I add a new email address in SFMC (From Address Management) that I would occasionally use to send emails from SFMC? The domain (specifically a top-level domain - TLD) of the additional verified email address, however, will be different, for example:

[email protected]

Will this additional verified email address use the same SPF and DKIM as the authenticated domain used for the SAP - email.domainxyz.com? What might be potential impacts on the deliverability using a non-SAP domain?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You will need to follow few best practices here

SAP domain is email.domainxyz.com

• Necessary to provide branded domain for all links, images, headers in email
• Necessary to facilitate DMARC compliance when using “domainxyz.com” from address domain
• SAP domain cannot be “domainxyz.com” because of DNS sub-entries that conflict with existing use of domain This you already have in place, through your existing SAP setup.

Since you also send as [email protected]: This is doable, but you must also purchase Private Domain SKU (in addition to SAP SKU) - while your tracking and image urls will still be on your SAP domain: email.domainxyz.com

For your new private domain:

• Necessary to set up DKIM authentication when sending via SFMC
• SAP domain and Private Domain must normally be in same domain (you can't mix e.g. .com and .uk)
• Due to above, sending from domainxyz.uk while having SAP domain of email.domainxyz.com will cause DMARC to fail, unless you ask support to enable “multi-bounce domain” for DMARC compliance.
• Don’t implement SFMC MX record for the private domain or it will break your corporate mail!
• You can now disable RMM, so that replies go directly back to corporate employees.