Send campaigns and other email from your own domain with hosted email, receive email at your workspace's Odden address, or connect your own email server.
Odden Cloud can send your workspace's email for you (hosted email) and receive replies and support mail for you (inbound email). You manage both from the Workspace section of the sidebar. Only owners and admins see these pages.
If you would rather use a mail server you already have, see Use your own email server.
Hosted email
Hosted email sends campaigns, sequences, meeting confirmations and ticket replies from a domain you own, such as hello@mail.example.com. You do not run a mail server.
Hosted email needs a paid plan. See pricing for what each plan includes. While you are on a free trial you cannot add a sending domain or send to a list. A trial workspace can still send through its own email server, but only a small amount:
- Test and staff mail to your own team: 20 recipients a day.
- Transactional mail that answers something a person did (a meeting confirmation, a ticket receipt, a double opt-in confirmation): 100 recipients a day, and at most 5 on one message.
Campaigns and sequences wait for a paid plan.
Add a sending domain
Use a subdomain such as mail.example.com. It keeps the sending reputation of your marketing mail apart from your main domain. Free-mail and disposable domains are refused, and a workspace can have up to 3 sending domains.
- Open Domains and choose Add domain.
- Enter the domain, tick Sending email, and save.
- Add the DNS records shown under Sending domains, or use one-click setup.
- Choose Check now.
Copy all records copies the lot. If your DNS provider adds your domain name for you, use the short names the page offers.
| Type | Name | Value | Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| CNAME (three of them) | <token>._domainkey.<your domain> |
<token>.dkim.amazonses.com |
Yes |
| MX | bounce.<your domain> |
10 feedback-smtp.<region>.amazonses.com |
Yes |
| TXT | bounce.<your domain> |
v=spf1 include:amazonses.com ~all |
Yes |
| TXT | _dmarc.<your domain> |
v=DMARC1; p=none; |
Recommended |
The page shows the exact names and values for your domain. Copy those, not this table. Skip the DMARC record if you already have one.
One-click setup
If your DNS provider supports Domain Connect, the page shows Add the records for me. It sends you to your provider to sign in and approve the records, then brings you back. Not every provider supports it, so the button only appears where it works. Otherwise add the records by hand.
Verification
We check a new domain every few minutes. Records can take a while to show up at your DNS provider, so it may stay Pending for a bit. The status becomes Verified when everything is in place.
- A domain still not verified after 72 hours is marked Failed. We keep checking it hourly, so fixing the records recovers it.
- A domain that is never verified is removed after 7 days, so the name is free to add again.
- A verified domain is re-checked daily. If its records go missing, it stops sending and the workspace owners get an email. It starts working again once the records pass.
Once a domain is verified, go to Email, fill in From address, From name and an optional Reply-to address, and choose Send test email and use hosted email. We send a test to you first, and hosted email only switches on if it arrives.
Warm-up
A new domain has no reputation with mailbox providers, so a flood of mail on day one looks like spam. For its first seven days of sending, a domain has a daily limit for bulk campaign mail:
| Day | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Messages | 200 | 500 | 1,000 | 2,000 | 5,000 | 10,000 | 20,000 |
Campaign messages over the day's limit are not lost. They wait and go out automatically the next day, and the owners get an email about it. One-to-one mail, like a ticket reply, is never held. After day 7 there is no warm-up limit. The page shows where each domain stands.
Monthly allowance
Each workspace has a monthly allowance of hosted messages, based on the contacts it holds.
| Plan | Messages a month per contact |
|---|---|
| Starter | 4 |
| Growth | 6 |
| Suite | 6 |
| Enterprise | Set for your workspace |
The allowance is never below 1,000 a month. Contacts added through the capacity add-on bring 3 messages each. Hosted email use on the Email page shows what you have sent this month against your allowance.
The owners get an email at 80% and at 100%. Sending is not cut off at 100%, so a busy month is not an outage. It stops at twice the allowance and starts again next month. If you need more, write to support or use your own email server.
Reputation and pauses
Mailbox providers judge you by how many messages bounce and how many people mark them as spam. Hosted email shares one sending account with every workspace, so we watch both and pause one workspace rather than let it hurt the others. Hosted email use shows both rates for the last 7 days once you have sent enough for them to mean something.
| Warning | Pause | |
|---|---|---|
| Hard bounces | 2% | 4% |
| Complaints | 0.05% | 0.1% |
| While a domain is warming up | 1% and 0.03% | 2% and 0.05% |
The owners get a warning email first. If a rate reaches the pause line, hosted email stops for the whole workspace until you have cleaned your list. Then write to support and we turn it back on. For what lowers these rates, see Deliverability.
Bounces, complaints and suppression
When an address hard bounces or someone marks a message as spam, hosted email adds the address to your workspace's suppression list and your campaigns skip it from then on. Soft bounces, such as a full mailbox, do not suppress an address on their own. The list is yours alone and is kept for as long as the workspace exists, so nobody who complained is mailed again. Marketing shows it as Suppression & Subscription.
We keep each message's addresses, times and delivery results for 13 months, and monthly totals for 24 months. Privacy has the details.
Receive email at your Odden address
Inbound email gives your workspace an address of its own, shown at the top of the page. Forward your support mailbox to it (Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace both can) and your mail stays where it is.
- Open Inbound email.
- Turn on Receive support email at the Odden address.
- Forward your mailbox to the address, then choose Save.
Mail to the address becomes a support ticket. Ticket emails ask for replies at the same address, so a customer's reply is added to its ticket. To send another mailbox, such as sales@, somewhere else, add a Mailbox, forward it to your address with +tag before the @, and choose whether it becomes a ticket or a lead. Leads need Sales in your plan.
Other options on the page:
- Email the team when mail arrives sends a short note for each new ticket, reply or lead.
- Filter out automatic mail keeps out-of-office replies and bulk mail out of your tickets. They wait in Filtered mail for you to release.
- Routing rules send mail to a ticket, a lead or Filtered mail by sender, sender domain or words in the subject.
Spam, bounces and automatic replies are ignored. Each sender can start only a few new conversations an hour, and messages over 10 MB are ignored.
How long we keep it
The raw message is held for up to 2 days and then deleted. The record of it in your workspace, and any filtered mail, is kept for 30 days. The ticket or lead it created stays until you delete it. See Your data.
Use your own provider for inbound
Instead of the Odden address, you can point your provider's inbound webhook (Mailgun, Postmark or SendGrid) at the URL shown on the Inbound email page. Choose Make an inbound token at the top of the page and add it to the URL. The token is shown once. Replace the inbound token stops the old one at once. For the fields your provider must send, see Email to ticket.
Use your own email server
You can send through any SMTP server you already use. On Email, fill in SMTP server, port, encryption, username and password, From address and, if you like, a name and reply-to, then choose Send test email and save. A test goes to you first, and nothing is saved unless it arrives. Mail is only ever sent over an encrypted connection (STARTTLS or SSL/TLS).
If you switch to hosted email, your server settings stay saved. Choose Use my own server instead to go back, or Remove to delete them. The warm-up limits and the monthly allowance above are for hosted email only.