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Comment by paul_f | Hacker News Reader

If someone could indicate which services don't require domain verification, that could be extraordinarily helpful to some of us.

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I'm a novice to transactional email; what sorts of use cases would make not verifying a domain name an (ethically) good thing? I can't think of a case where that wouldn't scream "spam", but I'm not sure about that. =)

verification of some sort should be a requirement, but in some cases domain verification is harder to do than a single email address verification. I don't always have control over the DNS (which is always how I've seen domain verification done), and getting access to it, or having someone change it for me, might take days or weeks (or get done wrong, or whatnot). I'm dealing with a couple of clients right now where any change request like that takes 2 weeks - that's just standard policy. But... we can verify "foo@company.com" as a single address immediately.

This isn't to say domain verification is a bad thing, but depending on how it's done, it's not always the first thing you can tick off on a project.

If you can't change the DNS records, how will you set up DKIM/SPF/DMARC? And what's the point of validating the domain before setting those up?

I was saying that sometimes you can't update any of that quickly, but you can - via amazon ses, for example - validate a single address. Doing that will allow you to get past at least part of a project's set up and keep moving until you can get dns issues updated. it's not a 'never do it', but 'that can come a bit later without being a roadblock' issue, imo.

But email is all externalities. Is the convenience of you being able to send email more important than the anti-spam management of "yes, we actually own this thing"? (icebraining's points regarding DKIM and SPF are more practical and, IMO, accurate, but the collective problem is more interesting to me.)

Such as my business which provides a SaaS service and email is one of the features. Small business customers don't always have the ability to update DKIM/SPF, especially is using GMail for example for email.

Amazon SES doesn't require domain verification unless you want to be able to send from arbitrary email addresses for that domain. If you have a known set of senders, you can verify just those email addresses (which works the usual way: email is sent and you click a link).

> some of us

truly, these are challenging times for spammers

I don't know why this is getting downvoted. A bunch of people in our coworking space have this exact problem.

They run SaaS bookings for companies. They (and their clients) want them to come from reservations@companyname.com so people can reply easily to their reservation and go to them. Current options look like setting up something like reply-companyname@saasplatform.com and then have a hook send it to the actual address, which seems like a bit of hassle, but maybe this is the cost of progress on spam.

Asking non-tech clients to configure DKIM/SPF is a problem for them.

You can't avoid DKIM/SPF by choosing a sending company that doesn't validate; you'll just get your emails dropped by the receiver.

And since Sparkpost lets you validate the domain using a DNS record, you can just add it along with the DKIM/SPF.

But Mandrill didn't require any of this wizardy and noones emails got dropped?

noones emails got dropped

Yes, they did. I'm the tech guy for a small cultural society, and their emails sent with Mandrill did get dropped by Gmail and other servers before I configured the SPF/DKIM records.

There's a reason why even Mandrill mandates SPF/DKIM for new accounts: https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205582267-Abo...

See response from daigoba66 below. AWS SES allows single address verification (not domain) via click on link received.

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