Not all email is equal. Mixing your password resets with your promotional newsletters on the same sending setup is one of the most common — and costly — deliverability mistakes. Here's why the two are different and how to handle each.
Transactional email
Triggered by a user action: order confirmations, receipts, password resets, shipping updates, security alerts. People expect these instantly, open them at very high rates, and almost never mark them as spam. That gives transactional mail an excellent reputation — which you don't want to contaminate.
Marketing email
Sent to a list on your schedule: newsletters, product announcements, promotions. Open and complaint rates vary far more, so the reputation is naturally more volatile.
Why separate them?
If you send both from the same IP and domain, a bad marketing campaign can drag down the deliverability of your critical password-reset emails. Separation isolates the risk.
mail.yourdomain.com for transactional and news.yourdomain.com for marketing — each with its own authentication and, ideally, its own IP.Setting up both
- Authenticate each subdomain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
- Use a dedicated SMTP relay for transactional mail so it's always fast and reliable.
- Keep marketing on its own stream with clear opt-in and easy unsubscribe.
- Monitor each stream separately so a problem in one doesn't hide in the other.
Treating the two as distinct is a small amount of setup that protects the mail you absolutely cannot afford to have filtered.