The Custom Bounce Domain is how SPF is implemented with SocketLabs. This is done without needing to adjust your existing SPF record.
Bounce Addresses
Email messages contain two "from" addresses, the Return Path and the Friendly From address.
The return-path address is also known as the Mail From, Envelope From, 5321.from, or the Bounce address. This address is not shown to the recipient and is the designated email address where bounced messages and other feedback is sent. In this article, we'll refer to it as the return-path.
The Friendly From address is also known as the Display From or 5322.from. This is the address that is shown to a recipient.
The return-path address is what a receiving server checks to verify the SPF record. The receiving server does not check the friendly-from domain, so an SPF record on the friendly-from is not necessary.
Custom Bounce Domain Setup
1. Log into your DNS provider for your sending domain.
2. Create a subdomain.
3. Point a CNAME for that subdomain to tracking.socketlabs.com.
To set up the custom bounce domain for example.com, the following CNAME record would need to be configured:
email.example.com CNAME tracking.socketlabs.com
This record tells DNS systems that when looking up email.example.com, they should redirect and look at the records for tracking.socketlabs.com.
Modifications to DNS settings can take up to 48 hours to propagate, but generally will propagate within minutes.
Return-Path and Custom Bounce Domain: Examples
Sending without Custom Bounce Domain set up in SocketLabs
If you do not set up any custom bounce domains, we will use email-od.com as the default value. Each server may only have a single default value configured.
This is a message that does not have any custom bounce domains set up:
Return-Path: <9ff5.82.c37d01248d0c5.847f6806d0589331@email-od.com>
From: Your Company <mycompany@something.example> via email-od.com
To: your.recipient@example.com
In this example, the receiving server will look at the return-path domain and will look for the SPF record belonging to email-od.com.
If you do not set up your custom bounce domain, your recipients are likely to see an additional "via email-od.com" in the sender details of an email.
Sending with Custom Bounce Domain set up in SocketLabs
If you have set up your custom bounce domain (in this case, bounces.something.example) to point to tracking.socketlabs.com, you will no longer see "via" and will have successfully set up SPF authentication:
Return-Path: <8c229047f6aa6add74c68806d0589331@bounces.something.example>
From: Your Company <mycompany@something.example>
To: your.recipient@example.com
In this example, the receiving server will look at the return-path domain, see that bounces.something.example points to tracking.socketlabs.com, and will successfully authenticate.
Multiple Custom Bounce Domains
You can add multiple custom bounce domain entries in the SocketLabs Control Panel. We will automatically match your from address to the appropriate custom bounce domain entry. If no match is found, we will use either your selected default custom bounce entry or we will use email-od.com as the default.