Email Verification on Subdomain

Email Verification on Subdomain

Hi,
The latest guidelines for setting up an email newsletter are to set it up on a subdomain of your main domain so that if you get put in a spam block, it doesn't block all your company email. We have been trying to set this up and managed to get our subdomain verified at news.thecompany.com (note please be specific in your SPF settings that it MUST be a text record and not the newer SPF record type - that one caught us).
Next step is to verify the email. Our intent was to send from marketing@.news.thecompany.com with a reply to marketing@thecompany.com, so we don't actually have or want an email address that will receive to verify the account. Without, going through the very painful process of setting up this whole system, just to verify, then taking it down again, is there any other way we can verify? 
Please note that this is the recommended way to set up these days, so it would be good for other people to be aware of too.
Thanks
Simon