Delegating a subdomain of your corporate domain is best practice. Our setup facilitates strict alignment throughout the body and technical headers of your emails, supporting you with building good sender reputation and reaching the inbox. If it’s not possible to delegate to a subdomain of your corporate domain, you can purchase a lookalike domain to send emails from Dotdigital. You can delegate a lookalike domain you already own, as long as the domain is not used for hosting website content or sending emails in another platform.
First, you need to check with your IT department and/or domain provider whether your subdomain can be pointed to us. This is because some domain providers may not allow subdomains to be pointed to different name servers to those of the parent domain.
The provider 123Reg does not let you to create NS records for subdomain delegation.
If your domain registrar's application doesn't provide you with the ability to delegate subdomains within their interface, then contact their customer support to request implementing it. Most registrars let you do this. If your provider does not support NS delegation, you must self-host which involves managing DNS records yourself.
Learn more in Verify your DNS records for a self-hosted from address.
Things to change
You need to create NS records that point to us only for the subdomain that you want to delegate to - not for your domain. Therefore, let's say your domain is xyzdomain.com and you want to use email.xyzdomain.com with us, in which case you'll need to add the following three nameserver records on your email.xyzdomain.com domain:
Name: email, Type: NS, Value: ns0.dns.dotdigital.com
Name: email, Type: NS, Value: ns1.dns.dotdigital.com
Name: email, Type: NS, Value: ns2.dns.dotdigital.com
The most important step here is to make sure that you're using whatever subdomain name you're delegating to us for these records. This would mean that if you're using the subdomain transactional.yourdomain.com instead, for instance, then you'd replace the name of 'email' with the name 'transactional' on the three records shown above.
All other NS records for the subdomain must be removed so that only the three records pointing to Dotdigital nameservers exist.
You'll find some step-by-step instructions below about how to implement this with the most popular domain providers.
Once the NS records are added and the CFA is added to your account, we automatically create:
A records pointing to our webservers,so that links work and are tracked
MX records pointing to our inbound mailservers, so that we can process certain types of bounces and unsubscribes
TXT records for authenticating your emails; SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
Important
Aside from the process documented for AWS Route 53, we generally don't recommend adding SOA records. This is because it can cause confusion for some servers when it's asked to get an SOA record from a nameserver which isn't the one the record points to.
Reasons to use DNS records
We rely on our DNS (domain name system) records being the same for all sending subdomain names that we host. There are many thousands of these.
This allows us to transparently and safely make changes when we need to add or update features, or our network infrastructure.
The reason we don't add custom DNS records is that Dotdigital is a service platform. We rely on the platform being consistent and not having special cases and exceptions. This allows us to provide a high quality and consistent service to all customers, and means our technical staff can work on it as a single platform.
After the subdomain or lookalike domain is pointed at us
Once the subdomain or lookalike domain is pointed to us, contact your Customer Success Representative to confirm associated costs and next steps, and give them the required details:
confirm that the subdomain is pointing to us
provide the alias you want to use for the custom 'from' address (before the @)
provide the username of the account that the CFA needs adding to
We can then set up your CFA for you.
It can take up to 48 hours for the CFA to be activated.
Delegate subdomains for different domain providers
AWS Route 53 DNS management service
To delegate a subdomain in AWS Route 53:
In your AWS Route 53 account, go to Hosted zones.
Select the zone you want to add the subdomain to.
The NS records for the subdomain must be added to the hosted zone for the parent domain. Don’t create a new hosted zone for the subdomain.
Select Create record.
For Record name, enter your subdomain.
Expand the Record type drop-down menu, and select NS - Name servers for a hosted zone.
For Value, enter the three Dotdigital nameservers.
ns0.dns.dotdigital.com
ns1.dns.dotdigital.com
ns2.dns.dotdigital.com
For TTL (seconds), we recommend entering 3600.
Select Create records.
GoDaddy
Follow these steps (after logging into your GoDaddy account):
Select your name in the top right corner of the app, then select My products.
Select DNS next to the domain for which you want to create a subdomain to delegate to us.
At the top of the Records list for the domain, select Add.
If you don't see a Records list, your DNS records must be managed elsewhere. You need to visit wherever your DNS records are managed.
Expand the Type drop-down menu, then select NS.
For Name, enter your subdomain name without the parent name.
For example, email if your parent domain is
email.yourcompanyname.com.For Value, enter
ns0.dns.dotdigital.com.Expand the TTL drop-down menu, and select 1 Hour.
Select Save.
Select Add More Records, and repeat the process to add the records for Values
ns1.dns.dotdigital.comandns2.dns.dotdigital.com.
Correctly setting DMARC
Contact our Support team if you're using Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) at an organisational level. If you're not sure you're using DMARC, check with your IT/security team.
We can then update your DMARC policy for your custom from address to the enforcement level you would prefer and add your DMARC reporting address.