Delivery Email Features
Emails are still an effective and efficient way to communicate, but organizations often worry that their legitimate emails won’t reach their intended recipients. Due to the sheer volume of spam on the Internet, many networks have filters set up to reject email that might be spam. To combat this, proactive steps are taken to ensure that emails reach their intended recipients and that emails are not falsely identified as spam. Let’s dive into the different ways to ensure optimal email deliverability.
* Participation in whitelist programs:
Businesses can participate in various whitelisting programs that help ensure that emails are delivered to their recipients’ inboxes. Companies may have whitelist agreements with AOL, Juno/Netzero, AT&T Broadband, and Comcast, just to name a few.
* Stay off email blacklists:
A controversial, but still widely used method of spam filtering is subscribing to one or more publicly available email blacklists. Blacklists contain IP addresses of companies known to have a history of spamming. Organizations can monitor DNS-based blacklists and take proactive steps to protect their IP addresses from the list.
* Publishing Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records:
Organizations can publish Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records not only for their domain, but also for domains they may host on behalf of their customers. SPF is an open standard that combats email address spoofing and makes it easy to identify spam, worms, and viruses through records in the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). Customers who use their own brand domains in the Source Line of their outgoing emails are encouraged to publish SPF records within their own DNS servers.
* Sign email messages with DomainKeys/DKIM:
Both of these technologies validate the identity of the sender and ensure that an email message is tampered with in transit from the sending server to the receiving server. Enterprises can sign all email campaigns using a domain signing source address with DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), to ensure optimal deliverability to recipients who authenticate messages based on these technologies, such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail.
* Responding to each spam complaint individually:
Even if people send legitimate emails that comply with antispam policies, it doesn’t mean that recipients won’t complain. Sometimes a recipient may forget that they signed up for a particular list. He may start by asking the person how the address in question ended up on the list. After obtaining the pertinent information, draft a response for the complainant and carbon copy.
* Email server log file monitoring:
A special log file analyzer can be used to monitor the email server’s log files for failed deliveries. This scanner generates a daily report for network administrators, who can then determine if there are any domains that are rejecting emails. Domains sometimes inadvertently block email from mass mailing networks that generate an excessively high volume of email, even when the email is not spam.
* 24 hour monitoring:
Some administrators proactively monitor the email broadcast system 24 hours a day to ensure the smooth delivery of their customer emails to their recipients. They receive alerts if a client engages in spam or sends content that could trigger spam filters on the recipients’ side.
* The “Spam Check” feature:
Before clicking the “Send Email” button, it is recommended that you click the “Check for Spam” button, if available. The Spam Content Checker uses the SpamAssassin engine to “score” an email for spam content. SpamAssassin is the world’s most popular spam filtering software, performing over 1,200 tests on an email message. For each test that an email fails, a score is assigned. If the total score is above a certain threshold (usually 5 points), SpamAssassin classifies the message as spam. It is recommended that you adjust your email to get a total score below 5 before sending it to all your recipients.