Overview
Share emails are sent from the advocate’s own email address, so a friend sees a personal message from someone they know. Some email providers publish a DMARC policy telling receiving mail servers to quarantine or reject any message that carries their domain in the From address but was not sent from their own infrastructure. Extole cannot satisfy that policy on an advocate’s behalf, so for those advocates Extole rewrites the visible From address to@email.referral-mail.com. The Reply-To address is always the advocate’s real address, so replies reach them either way.
When Extole Rewrites the From Address
Each time a message is rendered, Extole reads the DMARC record published by the domain in the From address and decides from that:
Extole also rewrites the From address when an advocate shares with their own address.
A subdomain with no DMARC record of its own inherits the policy in its parent domain’s
sp= tag. A sending domain such as share.yourcompany.com is therefore treated as strict whenever yourcompany.com publishes sp=quarantine or sp=reject, even though the subdomain itself publishes nothing.
Advocates on Gmail
gmail.com publishes p=none, so Extole sends Gmail shares from the advocate’s own Gmail address. SPF and DKIM authenticate referral-mail.com rather than gmail.com, so Gmail displays the message as sent via referral-mail.com and records a DMARC failure for it. outlook.com and hotmail.com behave the same way. Advocates on yahoo.com, aol.com, comcast.net, icloud.com, and att.net are rewritten, because those providers enforce.
Providers change their DMARC policies. Look up the current record for a domain —
_dmarc.<domain>, a TXT record — before drawing a conclusion about how a particular advocate’s shares are sent.@email.referral-mail.com, never to your sending domain. Your sending domain governs the program emails described below, not shares.
Sending every share from a branded address on a domain you control does make shares pass DMARC, but it is not a setting — the share email puts the advocate’s address in the From as it renders, so it takes a change to the share email creative. Shares then arrive as a message from your brand rather than from the advocate, and Gmail is more likely to place them in the Promotions tab. Ask your Extole contact before making that change.
Program Emails from Your Own Domain
Welcome, reward, and stats emails are sent from the address in your campaign’s Company Email From setting. To have them arrive under your own domain rather than@email.referral-mail.com, install Extole’s DKIM keys for that sending domain and keep all three CNAME records resolving to the targets Extole gives you. See Extole DNS Requirements.
If those records are missing, point at the wrong targets, or stop resolving, Extole treats the domain as unauthenticated. When the domain also inherits or publishes an enforcing DMARC policy, the From address on every program email is rewritten to @email.referral-mail.com.