Getting Emails Through

When sending large volumes of emails there is the potential for your emails to be considered spam. To minimise this happening consider the following advice:

1. Quality email addresses

This is arguably the most important aspect. The email addresses you use should be accurate. This means they exist, they are spelt correctly, and they are up to date. Email systems use clever techniques to see if your email address is up to date; for instance:

• They create 'honey pot' accounts. If you send emails to one of these accounts/email addresses, you must have got the address from an invalid place
• They re-activate unused accounts. This shows that you are sending an email to someone who hasn't had that account for a while - therefore your list is out of date

Here is some great advice from Sparkpost:

"Sending best practice means sending to only directly opted in subscribers that are actively engaged with your mail stream and you periodically remove subscribers that are no longer engaged with your mail stream. A good rule of thumb is that actively engaged subscribers will open and/or click on your daily messages at least once in a 30 day time frame; at least once on your weekly messages within 90 days; and at least once on your monthly messages within 12 months. Any subscriber that has not opened or clicked on your messages in the past 12 months should be removed from your list as they run the risk of becoming a spam trap. You should also make sure that your forms have anti abuse measures in place such as captcha . This is all to avoid having high rates of complaints, unknown email addresses, spam traps and low read rates all of which cause poor delivery as well as high spam foldering which affect everyone else sending and following best practices in your environment."
See also - https://www.sparkpost.com/blog/hitchhikers-guide-mailbox-providers/

2. Content

The content of the email should not really trigger spam. There aren't too many situations where the content of your email would trigger spam - unless you included a link to a known spamming site for instance. You should not 'mask' a link.

SPF and DKIM

This is one of the easier configuration changes you can make. You may need assistance with it depending on how technical you are and what domain you use when sending your emails.

SPF (sender policy framework) is a mechanism some ISPs use to determine whether the server used to send an email is valid. It's not 100% supported and as such is used when it has been setup, but not seen as a rejection if not. In our case, we send emails out through a company called sparkpostmail - therefore add this onto your SPF.
Also, the DKIM is an additional mechanism which does the same thing - its more secure than SPF.
Contact us to discuss these options and how to set them up.

How they work

Let's assume your email address is fred@dagg.com. In this case dagg.com is the domain. SPF will relate to dagg.com because this is the 'FROM' for the email, i.e. who is sending the email.

You have to make an alteration to dagg.com domain. SPF tells a receiving mail server (e.g. hotmail) which mail servers are permitted to send dagg.com emails. You need to be sure which servers you currently use to send emails from and specify those. As we use sparkpost for sending all of our emails, we need to include their servers.

If dagg.com was currently using gmail, you would list google's mail servers but we are not able to confirm that sparkpost can send emails on your behalf - therefore we need to remove the @gmail.com and change it to an acceptable domain - i.e. infoodle.com.

Here is a google page on setting up SPF for google:
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178723&topic=2759192&ctx=topic

To test your domain to see if the SPF is valid, type your domain name into this site:
http://www.kitterman.com

The full documentation for SPF is found at http://www.openspf.org

For more details and links, please see our Verifying Domains page.

For a more detailed explanation on sending emails safely, see this page:
https://support.sparkpost.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1972209-ip-warm-up-overview