All internet communications issued from your business should be easily identifiable as truly being from your company. You are trying to build trust with your customers, and teach them to trust you, not trust the whole internet. One simple way is to make sure that all your outgoing emails actually originate from a domain name that is either your usual domain name, or a subdomain of your usual domain name.
Let’s say that my company owns the website http://www.BigCompany.com . So my official domain name is BigCompany.com . So the best email address is me@BigCompany.com .
When I send an ordinary email, I use the my mail server; mail.BigCompany.com . If I am sending out an email blast that is so big it needs to be sent via a listserve or email vendor, then it may sent from the server named blast.BigCompany.com . This is good and proper.
What is a Sub Domain?
The way this works is that I own the domain name BigCompany.com . As the owner, I can (at little or no charge) set up as many sub-domains as I want. A sub domain is named something-dot-BigCompany.com . Generally, a subdomain represents a host computer or server and it is added to the left side of the domain name, separated by a dot.
To break it down you read the domain name in chunks right to left; so to read www.webmail.BigCompany.com you would say that this is part of the
com (commercial) section of the internet, belongs to the
BigCompany organization, is in the BigCompany group of
webmail, and the computer name is
www. The dots are separators. It is common to have 2 or 3 chunks, but 4 or more is perfectly legal as well. At any rate the name to the left of the last dot (in this case www) is always the name of the computer.
This is set up in the DNS records and it takes about 2 minutes for an IT person who knows what they are doing and has the correct authority.
Sub Domain Name Examples:
- www.BigCompany.com
- ftp.BigCompany.com
- mail.BigCompany.com
- webmail.BigCompany.com
- www.webmail.BigCompany.com
- blast.BigCompany.com
- list.BigCompany.com
- mail.mydepartment.BigCompany.com
Do you see the pattern? Good. So any domain name that ends in .BigCompany.com can be trusted to officially belong to your company because it is a sub-domain of your domain name. Any domain name that does not end with BigCompany.com may or may not be related at all.
The Basic Problem:
Companies send out blast emails to thousands of customers, but they don’t know what they are doing. Many business administrators don’t understand what we just discussed above. They hire a 3rd party email company to handle some mailing list management & sending. Not having control of the domain DNS, the 3rd party emailers can’t send the email blast from an official company server that ends with the usual company domain name (.BigCompany.com). So they send the email blast from a 3rd party and unknown server name like for example; BigCompany-mail.com or BigCompany.3rdPartyService.com or even worse; UnRelatedCompany.com. Does the customer have any reason to trust email coming from BigCompany-mail.com? No, they don’t. Anyone could spend $10 and register yourcompanyname-mail.com . There is a very big difference between a dash & a dot. The difference between
BigCompany-mail.com and
mail.BigCompany.com
as we discussed above, we know that I own BigCompany.com and all subdomains. We don’t know anything about BigCompany-mail.com . That is a different domain name. Anybody might own that, so we have no built-in reason to trust mail from it. As you may have noticed, spam filters may not trust it either. So e-mailings that originate from 3rd party domains and link to 3rd party domains can get tagged as spam as never reach their intended destination. I’m assuming that your company does not send unwanted email spam, but is trying to stay connected with your customers and readers.
The problem of Tricky crooks and spammers:
Don’t be fooled by tricky spammers that add your company name somewhere in the URL.
BigCompany.com.spammer.com Break it down! Starting from the right and working backwards we quickly see that it is a subdomain of spammer.com and is obviously to trick your customers as being from you.
http://BigCompany.crooks.com/BigCompany.com/login Also bad! Working backwards from the last chunk of the domain name we see that this belongs to crooks.com and they have a web folder named BigCompany.com/login. Tricky!
The point here is that there are crooks and spammers out to trick your customers. It is your responsibility to teach your customers to trust only your official domain & sub-domains, and not be tricked. Just for fun, look in your own email junk mail folder right now & see what crooks are doing to try & trick people into giving up their paypal passwords. Look carefully at the url links so you are not fooled too.
The Solution
When hiring a 3rd party email service, tell them that you require all outgoing business communications to originate from a sub-domain of your business’s domain name. Put them in touch with your IT dept and say that if they need to create a new sub-domain of your company’s domain and point it at the 3rd party mailing service’s mail server, that is OK, and they have your support. Your flexibility is in naming the subdomain, the part to the left of the last dot. You might choose blast.BigCompany.com or list.BigCompany.com . Your IT dept can either host that server, or point the DNS at the mailing company’s mail server anywhere in the world. Whatever works better for the mailing company. However, it is under your control, revokable if necessary.
One More Thing
This also goes for web links in your email communications, web tracking links, and linked graphics. You want to avoid sending emails with a bunch of links to 3rd party web servers, as that is suspect and may well get tossed in with the junk mail by the recipient’s spam filter. Your email should only have links to your website, or your subdomains. In other words, every single server name and URL in the email needs to end with YourCompanyName.com .
If you are using 3rd party vendors for email tracking, tell them that only official subdomains of your business may be used in the email blasts. Host your own linked graphics at an official subdomain of your business, or if you need the metric company to host those graphics, have your IT dept set up a subdomain for those as well. Maybe call it metrics.BigCompany.com . Again, this is easy & only takes 2 minutes for an IT person who knows what they are doing and has the property authority.
Remember, this is all about building trust with your customers, and getting your message past the spam filters by looking as respectable as you are. It is important to continually earn and deserve the trust of your customers.
Dave Nathanson
Mac Medix
As a recent example: Target.com hires a 3rd party email vendor to handle the sending of email blasts. Those emails all originate from target.bfi0.com (we don’t know who bfi0.com is) but if done properly, they should originate from epsilon.target.com so that everybody knows that they are really related to target.com
This has the additional bonus of keeping Target in control and able to regain control of the domain name if necessary.
good,well written,thougtful article!
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