Dear readers, I need your help. I have been using digicraft.com as my primary domain since 1995. An associate told me today that he looked in his spam filter and found 4 months of my emails. Digicraft.com has obviously been used to spam in the past, as almost all domains are hijacked at some point. The majority of people receive my emails ok, but I have no idea why/when my emails get stuck in a particular person’s email system.
At iDate there was a panel where several companies talked about how to avoid outbound emails getting stuck in spam filters. I’m not a bulk emailer but I wonder if someone could walk me through the process of validating and putting a gold star next to my domain so it avoids spam filters better. Leave a comment or contact me if you can help point me in the right direction, much appreciated!
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Without getting hugely bogged down in details (of which, many.)
You have to go through a separate (usually tedious and drawn-out) process for each of the big webmail providers (Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc–I don’t mention gmail because a) I don’t know if they have such a process and b) in my experience their filtering is good enough that you don’t need to worry about false-positives.) The filtering of the others ranges from “iffy” to “complete rubbish”.
The main webmail providers also have a “whitelist” option with additional requirements; some will also include payment to a third party whose whitelist they use. Such payments will be by mail volume. If you’re a big mailer it will get expensive fast.
If your mail server is already blacklisted, you need to find out which blacklists it is on. If you’re sharing hosting you should be able to find out which IP/IPs your mail server is using and check on its reputation. You may be able to change to an IP with a better reputation. All blacklists have their own (usually tedious and drawn-out) processes for removal. Warning: some are run by Net-nazi idiots incapable of reason.
I’m obviously leaving a lot out. Email deliverability is a modern nightmare. Thank the jerkoff spamlords. Good luck.
You might want to look into CertifiedEmail. I don’t know how much that one costs though.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/context/context-08.html
I just dropped you an email, but so others can discuss I’ll also throw my thoughts on the blog.
As mentioned by CE, the white list process is a bit of a pain. Do not expect immediate results undertaking negotiations with hotmail, yahoo, aol, excite, gmail and the rest to get on to their white lists. Additionally getting off of a black list is also a big pain as well. You’ll have to do things such as setting up a proper SPF record, domain key, make sure mail relay is disabled, and install domain certificates. Unfortunately these alone wont get you off of any blacklists and onto a white list.
There may even be a problem with who you have your server hosted on. Some unmanaged hosting services have entire blocks of IPs blacklisted simply because their servers are managed my novices and have used as a mail relay.
Once you get on white lists, this is something you will need to manage. It’s not a one time thing. Especially when it comes to the feedback loop with ALL the different email providers.
Luckily there are services you can use for reliable email delivery. I’ve broken them down into 3 usage scenarios. Business mail, Marketing Mail, Transactional Mail.
Business Mail – There are plenty of solutions for handling the delivery of business based emails. Port25, Mailtrust, StrongMail. Personally I’ve choose to go with the Google Apps collaboration tools. You can use the personal edition or if you’re a business you can use the business edition for $50/mo per user account.
Marketing Email – This is a huge business and again there are lots of available solutions. Return Path is one of the bigger services that manage your delivery reputation. There are also services geared to campaign delivery and reporting. The two biggest I’ve used are Campaign Monitor and Constant Contact. I personally like Campaign Monitory because of how they allow me to manage lists and do scrapes from our server to do the templating of our marketing emails.
Transactional Email – This differs from marketing emails as there is an action from your application that triggers the delivery of an email. Order confirmations, new user confirmation, personal messages, friend requests, reminders/alerts. Port25, Jango Mail, and Trigger Mail/SailThru are some that I’ve investigated and worked with. In the end I’ve used SailThru because their API was very easy to integrate with our application for delivery. They also allow me to integrate with google analytics.
There’s HUGE business behind email delivery and to be honest it’s a pain to do it yourself. Managing relationships to maintain your company’s email delivery reputation is a full time job and unfortunately you’re most likely going to be best suited to go for a paid service. I’d suggest starting with Google Apps, but you may find other solutions that meet your needs.
Hope this is useful/helpful for other ppl.
*NOTE: I know there are a LOT more options available for reliable email delivery. I’ve specifically noted the ones I’ve researched on my own and recommend.
Correction… Google Apps is $50/year per user account. Not $50/mo.
Interesting topic, I hate it when a domain is hijacked by spammers.
SPAM is usually stopped in two places, the email server (which may use black lists, etc..) and then the email reader (which tends to filter junk by the actual contents of the email). What email program does he use? Maybe his SPAM setting are set to high?
You should also use SPF for your domain. It will help you from getting on any blacklists in the future. Here is a summary of what SPF is that I quoted from a forum:
http://www.openspf.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
It is a simple DNS entry that lists valid mail servers for the domain. Any server which is set up to use SPF (al lot of servers now are) will not accept email from your domain unless it is sent from one of the servers set in your SPF record. This will help to prevent other mail servers receiving emails from your domain via mail servers which do not have the authority.
The first website has a tool to help build an SPF string and your ISP/Domain host will be able to help you get it entered into your domain’s DNS.
These are all fantastic suggestions and I’m hearing about sevearal companies I need to look into for other projects, thanks to all of you.
Another layer of complexity is that I am managing the domain with Google Apps, although it is hosted at MediaTemple. I have three accounts, gmail and others, all forwarding to the Digicraft.com Google Mail account. Everything gets downloaded to my desktop mail app via IMAP.
I sent mail through Comcast to Gmail and some blacklists say that I need to use Comcast as the email gateway to stay off their list. I need to look into this further.
I have SPF set up and a domain key.
Dating sites seem to be required to put in a lot of effort to keep their reputation clean. Yet another of those things that dating startups tend not to think about.
Off to search some more, AFAIK I am on three blacklists, we’ll see what happens.
Part of me wants to bail on Google Apps, really not much use and I already have an account for GoogleDocs, which is all people really use it for.
Dave, as I set up my site and prepared it’s public opening, I ran into the issue that my IP was killing all of my outgoing mail due to a spammer having previously used the IP (before I even set up my accounts) and thus got it blacklisted at Spamhaus. The only way for me to get off this list was to have the hosting company directly contact Spamhaus (they will not tak the word of a webmaster/site owner) and verify that the situation in question was resolved.
Places like Spamhaus run lists to blacklist based upon domain and/or IP addresses of the domain and then throw you on the list. The good news is that you can get off the list, it just takes a little time (Took me 3 days) and then a couple more days for the mail clients to all update and allow you back in.
As far as getting into the inbox vs. the spambox, those who post here need to check their spam box and mark your e-mails as safe, after a couple of times of doing this the filters will recognize they want the messages and drop them in their individual inboxes.
I’ve been using Google Apps the last 3-4 months and its working out well.
Goog apps is ok, still has years to go to replace MS Office, too many problems and zero customer support.