Move your sending domain: how to migrate without losing reputation
Sending reputation attaches to the domain and the IP, and neither transfers. Changing domain at the same time as changing provider turns one manageable risk into two, at once, with nothing to compare against.
Rebranding, consolidating shops, moving off a provider's shared domain: the reasons to change your sending domain are all legitimate. The mechanics are not difficult. The risk is entirely in the sequencing, and the single most common mistake is doing it at the same moment as a platform migration.
Change one thing at a time, so that when something goes wrong you know which thing it was.
What does and does not transfer
- Domain reputation does not move. A new domain or subdomain starts with no history, and mailbox providers treat no history closer to bad history than to good.
- IP reputation does not move either, and on shared pools it was never yours.
- Your list, its engagement, and its consent record do move, and they are what make the warm-up survivable — you can send the first messages to people who genuinely want them.
- Existing DMARC alignment has to be rebuilt for the new domain, and that is the part most likely to silently fail.
Use a subdomain, and keep two of them
The pattern that holds up: campaigns.yourshop.com for marketing, receipts.yourshop.com for transactional, one DMARC policy at the root covering both, and a separate DKIM selector for each service.
- A problem on one subdomain does not follow the other.
- You can change marketing providers without touching receipts.
- The transactional stream warms itself, because people open receipts and almost never complain about them.
The sequence
- Publish DNS for the new domain — SPF, DKIM with its own selector, and DMARC at
p=nonewith reporting. - Verify with real sends to Gmail, Outlook and one more, reading raw headers for three passes and alignment.
- Warm gradually, most engaged recipients first, roughly doubling every two or three days.
- Split traffic during the move. Send a portion from the new domain and the remainder from the old, shifting the ratio as the numbers stay clean. This is the step that makes the whole thing low-risk, and it requires a platform that will let you do it.
- Move transactional last, and only once campaigns are stable. Receipts are the messages you cannot afford to have filtered.
- Raise DMARC to quarantine, then reject, once the reports are clean.
What to watch while it is happening
- Complaint rate, per domain. Google's threshold is 0.3 % with a recommendation below 0.1 %. Compare the new domain to the old one on comparable audiences, not to a target.
- Hard bounce rate. A jump on the new domain with the same list means an authentication or configuration problem, not a list problem.
- Clicks, not opens — a like-for-like drop is the clearest sign mail is landing somewhere other than the inbox.
- DMARC aggregate reports for the new domain, weekly. They will show you anything sending as you that you forgot to authorise.
The record everyone forgets to remove
When the old provider is gone, remove its include: from SPF and remove its DKIM records. Left in place, they are a live authorisation for a service you no longer control and no longer monitor to send mail as your domain.
Keep the old domain's DNS alive and its DMARC policy in place for at least a year even after you stop sending from it. An unused domain without DMARC is a spoofing target, and it is still your brand on the From line.
Sources and further reading (4)
Checked on 23 September 2026. Provider prices, mailbox rules and legal guidance change — verify anything you plan to act on.
A move where campaigns cannot touch your receipts
Auralata sends campaigns from their own subdomain with their own selector, and knows who your most engaged customers are from real orders — which is exactly the audience a warm-up needs to start with.
