Email overview

Email is available on every plan and isn’t wallet gated. You can send your first campaign minutes after signing up, using the managed sending address Brudcast gives every new organization. When you’re ready to send under your own name, add your own sending domain. Everything for email lives under Channels > Email, on three tabs:

​

Two ways to get a sending identity

​

The managed sending address

The dashboard calls it your Brudcast trial address. It sits on brudcastmail.com, a domain Brudcast owns and shares between every organization on a trial address, and that shapes its rules:

• The address and display name are fixed. A campaign always goes out as mail@<label>.brudcastmail.com, with your organization name followed by “via Brudcast”. Anything you type as the from address is moved to Reply-To, so replies still reach you. Organization names longer than 40 characters are shortened first.
• Unsubscribe headers are always on, because mailbox providers judge bulk-sender rules for the whole shared domain.
• No sending keys and no SMTP credentials. Those tabs are locked, so use it from campaigns and add your own domain to send from code.
• The tracking hostname is set by Brudcast and can’t be changed.
• It can’t be deleted, and it doesn’t count toward the number of sending domains your plan allows.

It appears on the Domains tab like any other domain, and its address and display name are on its Sender Identity tab. It also completes the first two steps on the Setup tab, which read “Trial sending address issued” and “Trial address verified”. When your own domain verifies, the 500-a-day cap lifts and the trial address is scheduled to retire 14 days later. The Domains tab shows “Retires in N days” under its status. Move any draft or scheduled campaign to an address on your own domain before that date. On the date the address shows Retired, its DNS records are removed, and a campaign still using it is blocked at send.

​

Three ways to send

All three use the same sending domains, the same suppression list and the same reputation checks.

​

Setup path

Saving a sender address is optional. It makes addresses quicker to pick in the campaign composer.

​

What a sending domain gives you

​

Tracking and unsubscribes

Each sending domain’s Settings tab has a Tracking & Delivery section. Open it from Channels > Email, the Domains tab, then the domain. A campaign knows who each recipient is and which list they’re on, so it carries its own settings and can act on an unsubscribe. Mail from your application has no campaign behind it, so the domain’s settings decide for it.

• Tracking needs an HTML part. Plain-text mail isn’t tracked.
• Opens are recorded with a 1x1 image, and clicks by rewriting links through track.<your domain>. mailto: and tel: links, # anchors and unsubscribe links aren’t rewritten.
• One API call to several recipients credits every open and click to the first address in to. Send one message per recipient if you need per-person tracking.
• Unsubscribes adds one-click List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers to campaign mail, so mail clients can show their own unsubscribe button. It’s off by default, and always on for the managed sending address. An unsubscribe applies to the whole organization, not just the list the campaign went to.

Publish and verify the tracking record before you turn tracking on, or the tracked links in your mail break. To use a different hostname, select Edit next to Tracking Hostname and type a single label such as email or links. The tracking record goes back to Unconfigured until you publish the new CNAME and verify it, but the domain keeps its Verified status either way. The same settings can be changed through the platform API with PATCH /api/v1/user/sending-domains/{id} and the fields openTrackingEnabled, clickTrackingEnabled and unsubscribesEnabled.

​

Things to know first

• Use a subdomain such as mail.example.com, not your root domain. Its sending reputation then stays separate from the mail your staff send from the root domain.
• Mailboxes on the same domain. If you also host mailboxes on the domain, some records are shared. Read Add a mail domain before publishing both.
• Credits. Email uses 1 credit per message, and only for sends beyond your plan’s allowance. See Credits and wallet.

​

Related