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Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

My UK bank recently started using nationwide.nationwide-service.co.uk as an origin for e-mails.

I had to check WHOIS and contact them to ensure it was valid, it just sounded so phishy.

Given that previously nationwide.co.uk was used and trusted, I wonder what internal discussions led to selecting that new domain and why. And what advocates for the end-users spoke up and said "whoa dudes that's just confusing".

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It's fairly common for companies to send automated e-mails from a separate domain to try to mitigate the impact of spam filters. ceo@company.com doesn't want her e-mails to be marked as spam just because some marketing e-mails are being sent from noreply@company.com.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, that's likely the reason. Employee email addresses will be sent with @nationwide.co.uk and even if the communication in this case was important, enough people will mark it as spam. Using a second domain helps keeping the domain clean.

And I take it using a separate subdomain wont work either? I.E. if you send mail from hi@marketing.example.com it will still hurt frank@example.com so they need to get a different domain?

It depends on how spam filters are configured, but yes, subdomains can harm root domain's reputations. However, it's generally seen as OK to use subdomains to mitigate reputations being spread to the main domain. As long as you have your records in order to show what's going on, using a subdomain is usually OK.[1]

[1]: http://www.magillreport.com/Spamhaus-Provides-Answers-Part-F...

I wonder if this has caught on because the business want's to move fast with new email campaigns and such, but their IT people forbid them from getting a new subdomain?

I wouldn't be surprised if in some organisations it's easier to register a new domain than to get any changes made to the "mothership" domain.

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