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Set up and verify an email domain in Pendo

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Set up an email domain to communicate with your end-users with email outside of your app. This ensures your end-users stay engaged with your product through automated journeys or standalone emails sent from your organization’s domain.

Requirements

As part of the setup, Pendo must verify that you either own the domain or have permission to manage it. Without a verified domain connected to Pendo, you can't send emails through Orchestrate.

You must also set up a MAIL FROM domain, which helps to improve deliverability and ensure your organization appears as the sender of the emails.

Only Pendo admins can set up and verify an email domain.

Note: This feature is only available if Orchestrate or Listen is included in your subscription. 

Set up and verify an email domain

The steps below detail how to set up and verify an email domain so Pendo can send emails on your behalf. This ensures that your organization appears as the sender.

  1. In the left-side menu, go to Settings > Subscription settings.
  2. Select the Domains tab.
  3. In the Email domain field, enter your organization’s email domain, for example acme.com. This is the domain that the DNS records are authenticated for by Pendo. It's used as the domain address in the emails you send.
  4. In the MAIL FROM domain field, enter a subdomain, for example mail.acme.com. This is required to improve deliverability and ensure your organization appears as the sender. The MAIL FROM domain must meet the following requirements:
    • It must be a subdomain of the parent domain you're verifying.
    • It can't be a subdomain that you use to send or receive email from.
  5. Select Continue. Records are added to the page that you must copy into your domain host website.

    records_table.png

Copy domain records

To connect Orchestrate to your domain, you must copy all the Pendo records into your domain host website. This connection enables you to send emails to your end-users through Orchestrate using your domain name.

In the Records table, expand each record type and copy all the records to your domain host's website. To copy a single record to the clipboard, select the Copy icon in the relevant row. Alternatively, select the Download icon to download all the records in a CSV file.

download_records.png

You must copy all the records exactly. If the records don't match, verification might fail. After all the records are copied to your domain host website, domain verification can take up to 72 hours. An information message displays after the domain is verified, informing you of its status.

Delete an email domain from Pendo

You can delete your email domain from Pendo. To remove this domain's connection to Pendo Orchestrate completely, you must also delete all the records from your domain host website.

If you have an active journey or email currently using the domain, you must first disable the active journey or delete the email. Deleting an email is irreversible.

To delete a domain:

  1. In the Domains tab, select the trash icon.

    delete_domain.png
  2. In the Delete email domain confirmation message, select Yes, delete to confirm you want to delete the domain.

Add custom tracking domain for email identities

Custom tracking domains for email identities are important for several reasons:

  • Improved deliverability. A tracking domain helps establish trust with email service providers by aligning the links in your emails with your domain. This reduces the likelihood of your emails being flagged as spam and improves overall deliverability rates.
  • Branding consistency. Using your own tracking domain ensures that any links in your emails reflect your brand rather than a third-party domain. This builds credibility and provides a consistent brand experience for recipients.
  • Avoiding spam filters. Many spam filters scrutinize links in emails to detect phishing or suspicious activity. Using a tracking domain aligned with your sender domain helps minimize the chances of your emails being flagged as phishing attempts.

Add a custom tracking domain with a SSL and CDN provided by Pendo

This section details how to add a custom tracking domain where Pendo provides the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and CDN (Content Delivery Network). To begin, you need to select a domain to be used as your tracking domain, usually a subdomain of your email domain, and send it to Pendo support.  Pendo creates the following entities on your behalf:

  1. Custom tracking domain.
  2. SSL certificate.
  3. CDN distribution.

After creating the entities, Pendo provides you with a set of CNAME records to add to your DNS registry.

  1. Add the CNAME records provided by Pendo for the new domain to the DNS registry. This verifies the domain as an email identity, validates the SSL certificate and configures the use of the CDN distribution.
  2. After the entries are configured, contact Pendo support for the final enablement of the custom tracking domain.

Add a custom tracking domain with your own SSL and CDN

This section details a more advanced process for adding a custom tracking domain with your own SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and CDN (Content Delivery Network).

  1. Select a domain to be used as your tracking domain, usually a subdomain of your email domain, and ask Pendo support to create the relevant CNAME records for the custom tracking domain.
  2. Add the CNAME entries to the DNS record provided by Pendo for the new domain to the DNS registry. This verifies the domain as an email identity.
  3. Create a new account with a CDN, such as Amazon CloudFront.
  4. Configure the CDN to the origin, which is the SES tracking domain, for example, r.us-east-1.awstrack.me . The CDN must pass the Host header supplied by the requester to the origin.

    Reference the table below for the correct tracking domain:

    Pendo data center Tracking domain
    US r.us-east-1.awstrack.me
    Europe r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me
    Japan r.ap-northeast-1.awstrack.me
  5. Continue with DNS configuration:
    • Option A. If you use Route 53 to manage the DNS configuration for your domain, and CloudFront is your CDN, create an alias record in Route 53 that refers to your CloudFront distribution. For more information, see Creating records by using the Amazon Route 53 console.
    • Option B. In the DNS configuration for your subdomain, add a CNAME record that refers to the address of your CDN.

      Record Name Value
      CNAME custom.domain.com

      <cdn.distribution.address>
  6. Acquire an SSL certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority. The certificate must cover both the subdomain you created and the CDN you configured.
  7. Upload the certificate to the CDN.

Verify the custom tracking domain setup

To confirm your setup is correct, you must verify that the region reflects the region your domain was created in and that the protocol is https.

To verify the custom tracking domain setup, run the following command:

curl --head https://custom.domain.com/favicon.ico

For the command above, this response is returned:

(python-sdk-test) jdoe@12a34567b89c BaconRedirectService % curl --head https://custom.domain.com/favicon.ico
HTTPS/1.1 200 OK
x-amz-ses-region: us-east-1
x-amz-ses-request-protocol: https
Content-Type: image/x-icon
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2024 13:50:14 GMT


This response contains the following properties:

  • The x-amz-ses-region header value is the SES (Simple Email Service) region that receives the request.
  • The x-amz-ses-request-protocol header value is the protocol used for the request between the CDN and SES in the header.
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