Purely at server level only, what are all the steps that can be done to help your emails get to someones inbox, as opposed to their spam/trash/junk folders please?
Nothing that I know of. If your not spam gmail and etc shouldn’t spam you
Add the IP address of your server to your domain’s SPF record. This ensures that your server is authorized to send email using your domain(s).
Many thanks, I wasn’t aware of that one. Is there anything else that can be done?
Ensure that the mail the your server sends is [google]RFC compliant[/google]. This ensures that mail servers that penalize messages sent in a non-compliant standard are more likely to pass mail from your server.
Ensure that your firewall does antivirus/malware/spyware both in and out.
Ensure that you check RBL services and ensure you’re not being blocked by anyone. If you are, then it gives you a point to understand why you’re blocked.
Ensure you dns and reverse dns are from the same location. Many servers bock at reverse DNS records being different then the senders domain address.
Ensure your not on a shared server where the IP of the machine or (ip block) of the virtual servers aren’t blocked in bulk so not only the offenders you the people playing nicely are banded from people’s servers.
One thing to also know if are your emails arriving in other peoples junk folder or being blocked before they get there?
Regards,
Steve
Why not just use something like Mandrill or Sendgrid and not have to solve this problem?
Another good thing to add is DKIM, but it’s quite hard to implement.
Indeed, mandrill, sendgrid, et al take a lot of this dirty work out your hand.
At work we’ve recently switched to Amazon SES and we haven’t looked back. We had quite a few complaints of email not arriving or being marked as spam etc, but since we use SES the complaints have stopped altogether.
Thanks - as always, great help here. Extra info - the emails are not blocked, but end up in peoples junk/spam/trash folders.
The Amazon es seems good - has anyone else here personally used it?
We have seen more and more spam messages from Amazon SES IPs recently. If they don’t act to prevent that, their reputation will be lower soon and messages from their services will be marked as spam.
It’s known there are some dirty IPs on their platform, but if you inform them of those IPs they are more than willing to do something about it. Check out their support forums for evidence of this.
At least new accounts are throttled and limited to 10,000 emails a month, so they can’t do too much damage.