A Smarter Email Sending Strategy

September 30, 2025 by Michele Cavin, Creative Services Director

Moving Away from Shared Reply Emails

When it comes to email credibility and deliverability, who your message comes from matters just as much as what it says. That’s why using a shared sender address like returns@inside-info.com can hurt your chances of reaching the inbox. Gmail and other providers see generic addresses as promotional—and your members may too.

Why this Matters

• Deliverability – Shared sender addresses are more likely to be filtered into Promotions.
• Credibility – Members trust emails that come from your co-op’s own domain.
• Engagement – A familiar sender address makes members more likely to open and interact with your messages.

The Best Practice

We recommend creating a simple, branded sender address such as hello@yourdomain.com or maybe marketing@yourdomain.com. This approach avoids cluttering employee inboxes with bounce-backs while making your communications look professional and trustworthy. However, you may want to sift through the many auto response emails to monitor for legit communications from your members.

To support this, our team will work directly with your IT department to:

• Set up a subdomain (e.g., contact.yourdomain.com) for clean unsubscribe links.
• Update your SPF record to authorize sending from our servers.
• Whitelist our IPs to ensure messages are not blocked.

Plan B: We Have You Covered

We understand not every IT team can prioritize these changes right away. For clients still using returns@inside-info.com, we have a fallback: we’ll create a dedicated sender address such as yourcoop@inside-info.com. While not as ideal as sending from your own domain, this ensures your members still receive communications under your name instead of a generic shared address.