With the Email domain add-on, the mail that goes out in your agency's name stops leaving from the GoFeed domain and leaves from an address of yours on a subdomain, such as hello@mail.youragency.com. You register the subdomain, pick a region, paste three DNS records at your domain provider and, once they verify, quotes, invoices, briefs, invitations and reports switch sender on their own.
What changes, and what does not
Without the add-on, every email your workspace sends carries your name as the sender and a GoFeed address underneath it. The client sees "North Agency" in the inbox, opens the message and the real address is somebody else's. That is not a delivery problem, it is a brand problem: the one piece of the email that is not yours is the piece a client looks at when they doubt a message.
With the add-on, that address becomes yours. What changes is the sender of everything the workspace sends to third parties with your theme: quotes and invoices, briefs and their reminders, portal and team invitations, the monthly report, the pending approval notices and the chat digest. It is the same set of emails your branding already dresses, which is why the add-on is bought from the same settings screen.
What does not change is the mail GoFeed sends to you rather than to your clients: the login code, the password reset, the verification of your own email and the notices about your own subscription keep leaving from the product's domain. A login code arriving from your own subdomain would be harder to recognise, not easier.
Three things are worth being clear about before you start. It is a separate add-on: it does not come with the branding pack and it is not the Custom domain add-on, which puts the app and the portal on an address of yours such as app.youragency.com and uses another subdomain and another record. You can take one, the other or both, and the price of each is on the pricing page. And it is a feature of agency workspaces, like the rest of the white label branding.
A subdomain, never the root domain
The screen asks for a subdomain and refuses the root. mail.youragency.com or send.youragency.com will do; youragency.com will not, and neither will youragency.co.uk or youragency.com.es, which the screen treats as a root even though they have three parts. If your domain is shaped like that, use mail.youragency.co.uk, which passes.
The reason is practical. Your everyday mailbox, the hello@youragency.com you write from by hand, already has its own signing records on the root domain, and a second set of SPF records in the same place is the fastest way to break the mail that already works. A subdomain is a separate zone: its records do not touch the root's, and whatever your mail provider has configured stays exactly as it is. The screen says so in the field itself: that way your existing DNS records are left alone.
The subdomain is stored in lower case and each part accepts letters, digits and hyphens only. A workspace can hold one email domain, not several; to change it, you remove the first one and then create the new one.
The region is chosen once
When you create the domain you choose where the mail physically leaves from: the European Union or the United States. The screen preselects one from your workspace's country, and the note beside each option is the whole rule: the EU if the people who receive your emails are in Europe, the US if they are in the Americas.
It is the one decision on this screen that cannot be undone. The sending provider does not move a domain between regions once it exists, so there is no button to change it. If you get it wrong, the road is Remove domain, create it again with the other region and publish the records again, because the values change with the region. For an agency in Spain invoicing clients in Spain, the answer is the EU and there is nothing further to think about.
Everything in this article happens in one place in GoFeed.
Try it freeThe DNS records, one by one
When you press Create domain, the screen shows a table of the records you have to add in your domain provider's panel, each with its type, its host, its value and a copy button. The values differ for every domain and every region, so copying them from this article is no use: copy them from your screen. What is the same for everybody is what each one does.
| Record | Type | Host | What it is for | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DKIM | TXT | A host under your subdomain | The cryptographic signature proving the email left your domain | Yes |
| SPF | MX | A host under your subdomain | Where bounces and automatic replies come back to | Yes |
| SPF | TXT | The same host as the MX | Which servers are allowed to send in your name | Yes |
| DMARC | TXT | _dmarc.mail.youragency.com | What to do with an email that fails the two checks above | No |
The first three are checked by the sending provider and each has its own status in the table: Pending while it cannot see it, Verified when it sees it correctly and Failed when it sees it wrong. The domain's status is the sum of the three. A domain with two records right and one still propagating stays Pending, and one with a mistyped SPF turns Failed, which is not a wait but a sign that something needs fixing.
The fourth is different. The DMARC line appears in the table marked Not checked, with a note that says exactly what it is: recommended, we do not check it, but without it some mailboxes treat your emails with more suspicion. The proposed value, v=DMARC1; p=none;, is the monitoring policy: it asks receiving mailboxes to report and to reject nothing. It is not needed for the domain to verify or to start sending, but the strictest mailboxes look for it, and adding it costs one record.
With the four published, two warnings about the Host field. Some panels append your domain to whatever you type: if yours does, paste only the part before .youragency.com, or you end up with a doubled host that never verifies. And the TTL can stay at the panel's automatic value; it has no effect on verification.
Where to add them at each provider
The five most common panels have the same screen under different names. In all of them you create one new record per line of the table, choose the type, paste the host and the value, and on the MX you also fill in the priority the screen shows.
- Cloudflare. Open the domain, go to DNS and then Records, and press Add record. MX and TXT records never go through the proxy, so there is nothing to switch off.
- IONOS. Under Domains & SSL, open the domain, DNS tab, and use Add record. The host field accepts the full subdomain name.
- GoDaddy. Under My Products, next to the domain, open DNS and then Manage DNS. The button is Add New Record and the host is written relative to the domain.
- Namecheap. In Domain List, press Manage and open the Advanced DNS tab. The TXT records and the MX go under Host Records; if the domain uses Namecheap's own mail records, the subdomain's MX does not interfere with them because it lives on another host.
- Squarespace Domains. Under Domains, open the domain, go to DNS and add each line under Custom records.
If your domain is delegated elsewhere, to your website's hosting for instance, the records go there and not at the registrar. The way to tell is to look at where the records for your everyday mail live today: wherever those are, these go too.
Checking, waiting, and what happens next
As soon as you create the domain, GoFeed asks the sending provider to look at the DNS and keeps asking on its own: every few minutes during the first hour and hourly after that, for three days. Propagation takes a few minutes at most registrars and a few hours at the slow ones, so the domain usually turns Verified in the time it takes you to paste the records. There is no need to keep the screen open.
The Check now button brings that check forward when you have just fixed something. Bear in mind that the check is queued at the provider and does not answer instantly: the table usually stays Pending for a few seconds and then updates by itself. If the three days pass without the records showing up, the screen says so and stops asking; you review the DNS and press Check now again to resume.
The day the domain turns Verified, the switch is immediate and there is nothing else to enable. The quotes and invoices you send from then on leave from hello@mail.youragency.com, and so do the client portal invitations and the rest of the mail carrying your theme. The mailbox the screen proposes is hola; Change mailbox swaps it for hello or whatever you prefer, and that change never asks for a second verification, because what was verified is the domain and not the address.
Two details about the conversation that starts afterwards. Replies do not land on the subdomain: the email carries as its reply address the support email you set in Settings, or the workspace email if the support one is empty, so a client who presses Reply writes to your real mailbox. And the name they see in front of the address is the email sender name you saved, or the workspace name if you never changed it.
Finally, what happens if something fails. If one day the provider refuses your address, because somebody deleted a record or the domain stopped signing, that email is not lost: it is sent once more from the GoFeed address, with the same recipient, the same subject and the same body, and the sending log records where it actually left from. If the add-on drops out of your plan, mail goes back to the GoFeed domain that same day, but the domain is kept for 30 days: take the add-on again before then and it comes back without verifying again; past that, it is removed.