We've been asked by some customers about the right and wrongs of sending and receiving email and best practises regarding various functions and email from forms. We've focused on the things that can cause problems and if you're doing any of these it may be best not to or if we've highlighted something you're not doing then please do implement any recommended changes.

Email Forwarding

Are you forwarding email from your domain to an external mail provider like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, BT, Virgin Media etc etc? Then you're creating a problem for other customers.

Forwarding email greatly increases the chances that your email will be seen as spam and will be classed as such, or worse still, server level spam filters can simply eliminate the message without any notification. It can result in our servers being blacklisted, which means that no-one will be able to send any email at all.

When forwarding mail from your domain to another service, such as Gmail, all the mail received by your email account here is forwarded on regardless of the content. If Google decides it’s spam, it will take a look at the domain and the server that sent it. Sooner or later Google will consider you/us to be the spammer. This can result in poor domain reputation (possibly affect ranking) and all mail from the server will be rejected. This means all of your mail, and all the mail from other customers using that server IP will have the same issue. This can even affect whole IP ranges and a whole platform is blocked (which Microsoft tends to do regularly with some hosts). This will also affect how forms on your website work (see post below).

Please remember that providers like Gmail allow you to setup your account in the Gmail interface so you can send and receive email from your domain name through Gmail (you must have an existing email service). If you need help doing this then we've got some steps we can provide for you to achieve this.

We're currently running a script to list all forwarders on each cluster and will contact customers on a per account basis, however, if you're able to remove your forwarders then please do so.

Web Form Abuse

Do you have a form on your website, if so then please read on as we've seen a lot of form abuse over the last few weeks.

Any form on a website should have captcha enabled to prevent bots from signing up with random email addresses that don't exist. Why does this cause a problem? Well apart from the fact that you get more spam and you may or may not be forwarding that spam to a 3rd party provider, you'll also be sending a confirmation message to the bot that signed up. If the mailbox doesn't exist but it's an address such as randomstring@gmail.com then you'll just be sending what would be considered as spam to Google and it'll get knocked back as doesn't exist.

Add a captcha to your forms to prevent bots from filling them in and help to prevent any potential mail delivery issues and backscatter.

Auto-Responders

Whilst auto-responders seem like a good idea, they can't differentiate between a genuine email, a spoofed email or spam. Any email that gets sent to you will have an auto-response sent saying "I'm on holiday and I'll be back at some point". This would be fine if all your emails were genuine but for spoofed email addresses you're sending a message telling someone, whom you've never met, that you're on holiday, possibly with all your details in the footer. If it's spam then you're doing the same and also verifying that the address is active and you'll get more. On top of that, if the mailboxes sending spam don't exist you'll be sending what could be considered spam to recipient servers where the user doesn't exist eg : randomstring@gmail.com and mail will be rejected because you/we've become the spammer.

OK, but what's the solution? Well, just don't use it, just don't.

Mailing Lists

We don't allow bulk emailing from our platform for a reason. It's actually in terms and conditions. It's too easy for a recipient server to junk the email. If you were to send out 500 emails and 250 of those were Gmail addresses and that provider sees a large number of emails arrive at their platform all at the same time from the same IP and it's all being junked then that can't be good. Even small numbers eg : 75 being sent to members may not seem like much but multiply that by 10, 20, 100 other customer accounts and all of a sudden there is a problem and a subsequent (greylisting) soft complaint from the provider.

OK, but what's the solution? Use a 3rd party provider like Mailchimp (free for 2000 emails per month). You can add DNS records provided by Mailchimp to your DNS Zone which allows Mailchimp to send from your email address. You'll have better delivery rates and you'll also have access to metrics which will help you target more effectively.



Saturday, November 30, 2019

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