Can I send email from a domain without affecting existing users?

mryossu · February 22, 2021, 5:46pm

I have a client who has an existing domain name, for which they have a web site and email set up. They have asked me to do a new web site, and given me control over the domain name.

I would like to be able to send emails from the web site, using their domain name as the “From” address, but I don’t want to disturb whatever setup they already have for sending emails manually. I don’t know how they currently send emails, but given that their MX records are of the form alt1.aspmx.l.google.com, my guess is they use Gmail.

I want to use Amazon SES if it makes any difference.

Anyone able to advise? Thanks.

hanami.run · February 22, 2021, 8:19pm

Yes, you can.

In fact, anyone can email from your domain but upon receiving many mail server will mark as spam if you didn’t configure an SPF record.

Here are step to send email with Amazon SES:

Go to SES, add and verify your domain. They will ask you add a few CNAME/TXT record which don’t affect any thing on current domain.
Setup SPF. Since the current domain already use gmail, so don’t overwrite the SPF TXT record but only insert Amazon record. Example: ` “v=spf1 include:amazonses.com include:spf.google.com ~all”

Notice how include:amazonses.com was inserted in the middle.

mryossu · February 22, 2021, 9:38pm

@hanami.run Thanks for the reply.

I already verified the domain, and added the TXT record.
There isn’t an SPF record in there at the moment. Will I be safe adding one for amazonses.com, or do I need to include google, given that there isn’t one there now?

Thanks again.

hanami.run · February 22, 2021, 9:47pm

Let’s do for both for amazonses.com + google one as well. Whoever set it up before didn’t do it. So it should like this "v=spf1 include:amazonses.com include:_spf.google.com ~all"

mryossu · February 22, 2021, 10:40pm

Sorry to be dumb, but can you clarify this for me. Do you mean I add two SPF records, one with the name amazonses.com and one with the name google.com, both with the content you showed, or did you mean one SPF record for both? If the latter, what do I specify for the record name?

Thanks again.

hanami.run · February 22, 2021, 10:52pm

No, add a single TXT record like this in cloudflare