You can improve email deliverability with a personal domain

Around 85% of Buttondown users send their newsletters through the buttondown.email domain. And, because our team invests significant time and money in improving and maintaining email deliverability, their writing arrives in subscribers’ inboxes quickly and without any detours to undesirable destinations. But you might want to consider a different route.

For starters, sending from @not-your-domain.com isn’t nearly as cool as emails coming from @yourdomain.com (.io, .xyz, etc., work too, with caveats I’ll touch on later). More importantly, sending through your own domain builds credibility with the automatons that decide whether or not your emails go to spam. And that reputation is 100% yours. 

With a custom domain, you could start on Buttondown, migrate to MailChimp, then back to Buttondown, and your domain reputation should remain unaffected by everything that happens when you move your newsletter. In fact, as long as you follow deliverability best practices, your domain should actually end up healthier than a newsletter platform’s shared domain.

Why custom domains can do better than platform domains

Every new domain starts from scratch in terms of deliverability. All domains are unrecognized and untrusted by email service providers until proven otherwise. Authenticating your domain by way of DKIM, DMARC, and SPF is the first thing you can do to change that. Each acronym represents a string of text that should appear in both your domain name registrar (e.g. Namecheap) and your newsletter platform (e.g. Buttondown). 

Proper authentication will improve your domain’s standing significantly. The same goes for sending emails at reasonable (not too frequent) intervals, to addresses owned by real humans who open your newsletter. This “warming up” happens over months, not days. Providers will be suspicious when you first start sending from a new domain, but will increase their trust as you continue sending without acting like a spammer.

Using a platform’s domain is different. When someone signs up for a new account and starts sending emails using buttondown.email, they are taking advantage of the reputation that domain accrued long before they signed up. Right off the bat, they’re starting from a place of higher standing. But there are drawbacks.

Sometimes, people try to take advantage of a domain’s established reputation, creating a new account and drafting spammy or unwanted emails using Buttondown’s hard-earned deliverability. While there are a boatload of tests and checkpoints in place to prevent this, it is impossible to catch every bad actor. And they’re not even the only problem.

There are people who try their damnedest to send interesting, well-crafted emails on Buttondown’s domain, but still end up getting marked as spam or receiving some other form of CFBL complaint. Malicious or not, newsletters that run afoul of established norms harm the credibility of the sending domain and impact everyone who is using it. 

Behind the scenes, Buttondown maintains a bunch of distinct IP addresses and spreads users across them. If one person gets around our checkpoints and sends something awful, the damage is limited to that IP address and doesn’t hurt everyone sending on Buttondown’s domain.

All of this to say that no matter how good a newsletter platform gets at preventing bad emails from being sent on their domain(s), your deliverability will always be tied to the worst person you share the domain with. There is a sort of ceiling of deliverability on shared domains. When you send through your own domain, it’s all you. You’ll start with less credibility, but have a decent shot at ending up with more, often in a fairly short timeframe. 

If you already own your domain but haven’t been using it to send a newsletter, here are some tips for gaining the trust of email service providers:

• Never send to anyone who didn’t double opt-in to receive your emails
• Avoid spammy keywords (e.g. free, social security number, etc.) and formatting (e.g. all caps, exclamation points, too many images, etc.)
• Keep your From: name and address the consistent
• Clean your list to remove unengaged subscribers and bounced addresses
• Don’t send more than once a week
• Make sure every email is formatted accessibly

If you don’t own a domain, buying one and connecting it to a newsletter platform only takes a few minutes.

How to set up a custom newsletter domain

There are several websites that sell domain names. I’ve used namecheap.com a few times and it works well for first-time buyers, but with everyone from WordPress to Cloudflare selling domain names, you have options. All you have to do is search for the name you want, pick a top-level domain (e.g. .com, .xyz, .io, etc.), and add it to your cart. It should cost anywhere from $5 to $30 per year.

A .com TLD can be expensive—around $12 if the name’s never been claimed, but good luck finding one of those today. A resold .com can cost thousands of dollars; the rarest, millions. But .com’s come with the best off-the-shelf deliverability. “Domain reputation is not evaluated solely on the second-level domain (e.g., yourcompany) but is also influenced by the behavior and historical use of the TLD itself,” according to The Domain Name Encyclopedia. “Mail servers ingest and share reputation data at scale. When a particular TLD exhibits a high rate of spam or malicious activity, it may be treated with greater scrutiny or even blanket suspicion. This doesn’t mean all domains using that TLD are automatically blocked, but it does mean the burden of establishing and maintaining a positive reputation is higher.”

If you’re running a personal newsletter, boutique agency, or anything relatively small, don’t worry about using an “alternative” TLD, as less than half of startups today use a .com. Email providers evaluate sending behavior over time, so consistent, clean practices matter more than the TLD in the long run. Whatever you end up choosing, you need to get DNS records from your newsletter platform and add them to your domain provider’s DNS settings.

In Buttondown, for example, they’re under Settings > Custom domains. Add your domain name in the Sending domain field, then click the Learn more button next to the notification for steps to finish the setup process (or go directly to your DNS records page). 

Next, if you’re using Namecheap, go to your dashboard, hit the Manage button next to your domain name, and go to the Advanced DNS tab (most domain registrars will have a similar flow). From there, add a new record for each of those provided in Buttondown (or whatever platform you’re using), mapping each header to the corresponding field in Namecheap (Type, Host, and Value). Give it half an hour to propagate and send yourself a test newsletter to double check that it’s your domain in the To: field.  

That’s it! Each time you send a newsletter with the correct (DNS, DKIM, DMARC, and SPF) records, and recipients open said newsletter without flagging it as spam, email service providers will move you up the deliverability ladder. If you’re worried that emails from your domain are not landing in recipients’ inboxes, there are a few ways to investigate.

What to do when you’re worried about your domain’s deliverability

There are several ways that poor deliverability might manifest itself. Open rates and click rates might fall off a cliff. A sharp uptick in hard bounces and temporary failures is also a clear sign something is wrong. And, obviously, you don’t want subscribers complaining that your newsletters are going to their spam folders. All of these symptoms fall into one of a few buckets.

Problems with deliverability stem from authentication issues (DNS, SPF, DKIM, or DMARC), poor subscriber engagement (opens, clicks, unsubscribes), sending behavior (frequency, message content, undeliverable addresses), and domain reputation. Thankfully, you can often diagnose issues without getting too technical, thanks to tools like:

• Google Postmaster Tools provides Gmail-specific domain reputation data.
• Postmark's spam score checker gives you technical and content recommendations.
• MXToolbox shows you DNS issues and any spam lists that include your domain.
• GlockApps has a suite of freemium tools for checking SPF, DMARC, and DKIM records.

Fix whatever errors they surface and send a test email to a Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud account to see how each client handles your content. 

Most of these tools take only a few minutes to generate domain reports. While it’s especially important to check them right after you purchase and set up a custom domain sending, I’d recommend running the test every few months, just to stay on top of deliverability.

Improve the deliverability and design of your newsletters

Sending from custom domains usually provides better deliverability than shared domains. It’s included as a feature on Buttondown’s free plan because basic deliverability features should never be paywalled. The same goes for newsletter portability and giving you the tools necessary to build a following and reputation that’s yours to run from whatever platform you’d like.

Hosting your newsletter archives on your own domain is a strictly cosmetic upgrade that takes things one step further. It requires a Standard plan but the setup is essentially the same, with the main difference being where people view your newsletter in a browser. Adventures in Typography, for example, is at buttondown.com/adventures/archive, while Typographic & Sporadic (an equally awesome but totally different newsletter!) is accessible via elliotjaystocks.com/newsletter. 

The most important thing to remember is that none of these things are required to send emails that land in your subscribers’ inboxes. You can sign up for an account and start sending through Buttondown’s domain, wait until you settle into a groove, and make the switch to a custom domain when you’re ready. Until then, ignore the technocratic raindance that is deliverability and let us handle it. Newsletters should be easy and fun, and the alphabet soup of DNS is anything but!

Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash