1. The short version
Your camp’s registration page lives on your domain. Your receipts, reminders, and waitlist offers should leave from that same domain. When they do, the address a family sees in their inbox matches the site they just registered on, and mail providers stop treating the difference as a warning sign.
Setting this up takes three DNS records and about ten minutes. If we manage your domain, there is nothing for you to do and you can stop reading here. If you or your athletic department’s IT team manage it, sections 4 and 5 are the part to forward to them.
2. What happens if you skip it
Nothing breaks. Your camp still runs, families still get every message, and we send it from our own verified domain on your behalf. The From line reads as your camp name followed by (via Advance Sports Group), which is accurate: we operate the mailbox, and saying so is better than hiding it.
What you give up is smaller than it sounds and worth naming honestly. Gmail and Outlook notice when the address a message comes from and the links inside it point at two different companies. It is one signal among many, and it will not by itself send your mail to spam. But it is a signal you never have to give them, and the sender reputation you build on your own domain belongs to you rather than being pooled with every other program we send for.
3. What changes for families
- The From address becomes an address at your domain instead of ours. A family reading quickly sees your program, not a vendor they have never heard of.
- The (via Advance Sports Group) note comes off, because there is no longer a mismatch to explain.
- Replies still go wherever you have set your reply-to address, which is a separate setting you control on the Comms page and does not have to be on this domain.
- Nothing about the content, the branding, or the unsubscribe handling changes. This is the envelope, not the letter.
4. What we will ask you to add
We create a sending subdomain for you, usually mail.yourdomain.com, and send you three records to add wherever your DNS is managed. A subdomain rather than your root domain is deliberate: it keeps camp mail entirely separate from your staff email, so nothing we do can affect the mail your coaches send and receive every day.
The three records look like this. Your real values will differ:
This is DKIM. It publishes a public key. Every message we send for you is signed with the matching private key, which never leaves our provider, so a receiving server can check the signature and know the message genuinely came from you and was not altered in transit. This is the record that does the real work.
These two are SPF and the bounce path. Together they let a receiving server confirm that the machine handing over the message is one you authorized, and they give us somewhere to receive bounces and complaints so a dead address stops being mailed instead of quietly damaging your reputation.
Note that the MX record is on send.mail.yourdomain.com, a subdomain of a subdomain. It does not touch the MX records that deliver your staff email, and it cannot redirect mail sent to your regular addresses.
5. The fourth record, and why it is worth adding
The three above are required. A fourth, DMARC, is not required and we recommend it anyway:
DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with mail that claims to be from your domain but fails the checks above. p=none means “do nothing, just tell us”—it changes no delivery decisions at all. What it buys you is the reporting address: providers send a daily summary of everything sent in your domain’s name, including by anyone who should not be. That is how you find out if someone is spoofing your program, and it is the only way to know whether it would be safe to tighten the policy later.
If you would rather those reports come to you than to us, say so and we will point the address at your mailbox instead. There is one extra record involved when reports cross between domains, and we handle it either way.
6. What we need from you, in order
- Tell us the domain your camp site runs on and who controls its DNS. If your athletic department’s IT team does, introduce us and we will send them this page.
- We create the sending subdomain and send you the exact records. They are generated for your domain specifically, so use the ones we send rather than the examples above.
- You or your IT team add them. Most DNS panels apply them in minutes, though the published wait is up to 48 hours.
- We confirm all three verify, then switch your camps over. Nothing changes for families until that switch, and if verification has not completed your mail keeps going out the old way rather than failing.
7. Things worth asking us
Can this affect our regular staff email? No. Everything sits on a subdomain we create for camp mail. Your existing MX records are untouched, and adding these does not route, intercept, or delay any mail your program already sends or receives.
What if we leave? Delete the records. They are yours, on your domain, and removing them stops us sending as you immediately. We do not hold the domain, and there is nothing to unwind on your side beyond those records.
Can we use our root domain instead of a subdomain? Technically yes, and we will advise against it. Camp mail is seasonal and goes out in bursts to families who may not remember signing up, which is exactly the pattern that earns a domain a poor reputation. Keeping it on a subdomain means that risk never reaches the address your coaches recruit from.
Who can see the private key? Nobody, including us. It is held by our mail provider and is never exposed through our software or yours. The only thing published is the public half, in the DKIM record.