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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for that insight. Curious though, why did they not use a subdomain? Would communications. Or paypal-communications. As a subdomain be worse in their opinion?

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Some of the "subcontracted" sites that do marketing stuff are better equipped to handle a top-level domain than a subdomain.

And a subdomain requires negotiating with someone in the bowels of IT, whereas anyone can register PayPal-communications.com

Oh man, this is been my exact experience. You can pretty much chart the growth of a company by watching how much marketing is done with in house teams and how much goes to external agencies.

And as soon as the external agencies are involved, they want as much control as possible. I don’t blame them: setting up DNS entries for some stupid marketing site rarely rises to anyones priorities. So they route around internal controls. Everyone is happier, and everything gets slightly worse.

I've yet to see someone be able to handle a delegated subdomain (where you set subdomain.example.com to have NS pointing at the contractor's setup). Too bad, as it's exactly what it was designed for.

We try to get our enterprise clients to delegate a subdomain to us; the answer is almost always no. "You'd be able to change the records! Oh sure, we can do a CNAME." Sigh.

I'm not really sure. Probably something about tools not respecting or ignoring them or "they don't look as nice" or some other silly reason.

Edit: To clarify, there were a lot of good reasons not to allow them to link to a subdomain, especially they were running marketing software made by other companies, because there is a lot of nasty security issues around cookies with subdomains.

But there was no reason for them not to route their outbound email through a single domain, because the weren't supposed to run 3rd party mailers without deep audits.

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