alt Hacker NewsAs former email admin who has put up with this, you are breaking cardinal rule about mixing marketing and transactional emails.
Marketing should be different IP/Domain from transaction emails.
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You don't even have to personally, many email providers were blocked by Microsoft for no apparent reason. We lost critical emails because Microsoft decided one day that alerts from one of our companies was mass spam and started blocking them, after getting their emails daily for 5+ years.
That is one of the ways how Microsoft acts evil. Email was never supposed to be this way. You have zero visibility into why some emails are blocked. One thing is to quarantine emails / put them into spam. But to reject them without any proper technical reason (like wrong SPF) is a nightmare from sysadmin standpoint.
Is 40k tranasactional emails a month enough to keep a dedicated IP warm? That's my main concern for not using a dedicated IP for transactional emails.
How would I do that?
Have "mycompany.com" and "marketing-mycompany.com"?
How
Yep, and no a subdomain does not suddenly insulate your sender reputation.
This BS is pedaled by the email tools who want you to have less friction setting up DNS when onboarding to their tool (less conflicts on a new subdomain).
If you just check the latest version of Google Postmaster Tools, you can see sends from your root domain and subdomain cross-polluting your reputation in Gmail. They aren't dumb.
Learned this the hard way. Sent maybe 50 outreach emails from the same domain handling transactional stuff (signup confirmations, notifications). Domain reputation tanked within a week and the transactional emails users actually needed started landing in spam.
The painful part is recovery. You can fix SPF/DKIM/DMARC in an hour but domain reputation takes weeks to rebuild. Microsoft's SNDS portal shows you almost nothing useful while you wait.
Set up the subdomain split from day one if you're a small SaaS. Costs nothing.