Where replies go, and how to put them on your own domain

Most addresses businesses send marketing and automated mail from are send-only: there is no mailbox behind them. That is normal and correct. The problem is what happens when a recipient hits Reply anyway — and they do.

What happens by default

Solstral puts a Reply-To on the mail it sends, pointing at an address that routes back into the CRM and threads the reply onto the right record. Without one, a reply goes to the From address, and a reply to a send-only address is rejected at the recipient’s mail server. They believe they have answered you. You never hear from them, and nothing anywhere tells you it happened.

This applies to meeting invitations and reminders, survey requests, subscription confirmations, support acknowledgements, campaigns and one-to-one mail alike.

Why move it to your own domain

By default that reply address sits on a domain of ours, shared with other customers. It works, and replies thread correctly. But the address a recipient sees when they reply is then on a different domain from the one you sent from, and that mismatch is precisely the shape phishing takes — a trusted-looking From, replies redirected somewhere else. Spam filters weigh it. So do people who look.

To be exact about the risk, because there is a lot of bad information about this: Reply-To is not part of SPF, DKIM or DMARC. A mismatched Reply-To cannot fail authentication and cannot break alignment. It is a trust signal, not an authentication check. It is a real signal nonetheless, and it is the last part of your email still carrying our name.

Turning it on

1. Open Settings → Email and click the sending domain.
2. Find Reply routing in the Authentication list and click Set up.
3. Publish the records shown — the ownership CNAMEs, plus one MX record on reply.yourdomain.com.
4. Wait. Solstral re-checks automatically; there is no ticket to raise and no button you have to remember to press.

Once it verifies, replies arrive at [email protected] and carry your brand name in front of the address rather than arriving as a bare machine-generated string.

If you turn it off again

Nothing breaks. Replies fall back to the shared address, exactly as before you turned it on, and still thread onto the right record. You can leave the MX record in place or remove it; neither causes a bounce.

Campaigns and replies

A campaign will refuse to schedule if its mail would invite a reply that nothing can catch — a send-only From, no Reply-To, and reply logging switched off. The error names the address and offers the three ways out: turn on reply logging, set a Reply-To on the campaign, or send from an address someone reads. This is a deliberate block rather than a warning, because the alternative is discovering it from a customer who says they replied twice.