Overview

If you’re building a platform that lets your users send email (whether that’s marketing newsletters, booking confirmations, fundraising campaigns, or anything in between) you’re dealing with a set of challenges that most email APIs weren’t really designed for. Most providers treat every sender as a single entity. But you’re not sending email yourself. You’re orchestrating email on behalf of dozens, hundreds, or potentially thousands of different users, each with their own sending reputation, their own domain, and their own audience. That’s a fundamentally different problem—and it deserves a purpose-built solution. Helo is built with platforms like yours in mind.

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The challenges platforms face

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Keeping your users’ sending isolated from each other

When one of your users has a bad day — a spam complaint spike, a poorly targeted campaign, a misconfigured integration — it shouldn’t become everyone’s bad day. With shared sending infrastructure, problems bleed across users. You need true isolation between senders, with per-user visibility into what’s happening and the ability to act on individual accounts without affecting the rest.

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Authenticating your users’ domains

Your users want email to come from their domain, not yours. Setting up proper domain authentication (SPF, DKIM) for each of them should be straightforward — not a support nightmare for you or a confusing obstacle for them.

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Getting meaningful insight per user

Aggregate stats are nearly useless when you’re supporting a platform. You need to know how each user’s email is performing—deliverability, bounces, engagement, spam reports—so you can manage your customers accordingly.

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How Helo addresses this

Helo’s Channels give each of your users their own isolated sending environment — dedicated stats, dedicated reputation, and dedicated controls. If one user’s sending triggers a spam flag, you can pause that channel without touching anyone else. And our domain tools make it straightforward to authenticate your users’ domains, so their emails land where they should. We’ve thought carefully about the platform use case because we think it’s underserved. You shouldn’t ha… TODO ??? Talk to us about your platform use case →

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Separate your users’ sending with Channels

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Domain management for platforms: How to authenticate your customers’ domains for sending

If you’re building a platform that sends email on behalf of your own users, you might want to allow your customers to use their own domains for sending. The requirements for authenticating a domain for sending we described here still apply, and you’ll be in charge of exposing the domain verification flow to your end users within your UI. That process typically looks like this:

1. Your customers choose the domain they want to send from
2. You use the Domains API to add your customer’s domain as a new sending domain
3. You display the DNS records generated by Helo to your end user
4. Your customer adds those records to their DNS provider
5. Helo verifies the domain once the records appear — and once that’s done, your user can start sending via your platform using their own sending domain.

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Best practices for a smooth domain verification process for your end users

Working with DNS records can be an intimidating experience — especially if the end users of your platform are less tech-savvy. Here’s what you can do to make the experience as painless as possible for your users: Provide DNS-provider specific instruction DNS providers have different workflows for DNS updates, so it might be helpful for you to add instructions for the most popular ones to your end user documentation. Create a “send instructions to a coworker” flow Is the human who’s using your platform unlikely to be the human to have access to their domain’s DNS? A “send instructions to a coworker” flow will make it easier for them to pass the DNS record instructions along to the colleague who does. Provide clear user feedback in your domain verification UI Showing your users whether the domain verification process was successful (or not) will help them gain confidence (and reduce support questions on your end). You can use our Domains API endpoint to fetch a domain’s verification status to provide feedback to your users.