email delivery, do you know your emails will be received

[nealrm]

This is something that many of us just take for granted. We assume that when we hit send, that the email will be received. For those of you that have your own sites and depend on emails from the site being received, you may want the rethink that. On my site visitors can send email to agent asking about a property. I also use the site to send invoice and listing update notices. This morning I noticed that some of the emails were being block by anti-spam programs. It was not because of anything that I did or that the visitors to my site did, but because my email service host uses a share IP address. One of the other companies that used the same IP address apparent was flagged for sending spam. So instead of flagging emails from that address, the spam list provider just flagged the entire IP address.

I am taking steps now to change to a package that has a dedicated IP address, that should prevent others from effecting my emails. But I did have a rough morning before that.

[MyITGuy]

I utilize an outbound 'smarthost' for my e-mail infrastructure which is a part of a spam/antivirus/disaster recovery service I provide to my clients for inbound/outbound mail. This company has the resources to take action if/when their IP's appear on a black list, as well as sometimes paying certain companies to ensure e-mail delivery. In the 3 years or so that I've been with them, I've never had my mail flagged/blocked as spam.

For my servers that run my hosting part of the company, I'm in charge of that infrastructure and IP space and I have monitoring setup to alert me if one of my IP's is blacklisted and can take corrective action pretty quickly (Usually setting the outbound mail to use a different IP on a temp. basis).

[MyITGuy]

So instead of flagging emails from that address, the spam list provider just flagged the entire IP address.
This is actually the best/common way of doing things. If a server/IP is compromised, the IP Address is the only common denomiator as everything else can be forged.


I am taking steps now to change to a package that has a dedicated IP address, that should prevent others from effecting my emails. But I did have a rough morning before that.
Something to keep in mind...even if your site has a dedicated address, your mail can still be routed out over the shared IP Address, or with some providers it can be routed out the shared e-mail infrastructure.

Another item to consider - Some providers tend to blacklist whole subnets...so if customer A on 20.20.20.1 and customer B on 20.20.2 are sending spam, some providers will block 20.20.20.1 through 20.20.20.254. For this reason, you should find a provider who is proactive in monitoring their network and/or screens their customers for fraudulent activity when they sign up.

[Harold Mansfield]

I know for a fact that there have been problems with BlueHost emails lately. I've had a few emails bounce back from Blue Host clients over the past 3 months.

Upon further inspection it appears that one of their IP addresses on their email servers is on 3 blacklists, which makes my servers deny it.
Since the IP addresses rotate, usually if clients send it a second time, it comes through.

I talked to Blue Host about it and they know of the problem, but appear to be helpless to fix it quickly and apparently still haven't removed that IP address.

I have no idea how to make my email server accept emails from the bad IP, and probably don't want to do that anyway.

[billbenson]

One thing to be aware of as well is html in emails. I send out quotes and invoices in html. I'm in the process of changing this. A couple percent of my clients either strip off the html which makes it look like gibberish or they send it to spam on the email server for the company. My client has no way of getting it. Something as simple as a logo can trigger this.

A lot of people put their corporate logo's in their email signature. This could cause the email not to be received. It's also a pet peve of mine because I can't copy and paste a signature if its an image, and I do this a lot.

[samie]

Hopefully this is fixed by now.

It's sad because there are so many different blacklist companies out there and they all work differently. Like some may allow you go to their site and remove it instantly, or maybe instantly the first time, but then if it happens again, they will have waiting periods that keep getting longer and longer. So then it's somewhat out of the Web Hosters control.

Then you have some of the blacklist companies who force companies to pay them to be delisted. Out of all the Web Hosting companies I've worked with, the consensus is that they feel they are being blackmailed and they take a stand against them by not paying to be delisted, even if that means their customers will have to put up with it(and the customers are not told this). Although then you have some Hosting Providers that will just rotate their IP addresses, but then there are some that refuse to do even that :S

Funny thing is too, in the bounceback emails you should be able to get your hosters IP address. You could go and submit it yourself to be delisted, and/or check to see if it is one of those companies that "blackmail".

[Brian Altenhofel]

For transaction emails (those generated by a web application), I use Sendgrid. It was an absolutely essential thing for me to do with one of my sites that sends several thousand emails per day (vBulletin subscription and private message notifications). Basically, the way I look at it, I'm paying them to do to things: send large amounts of emails, and keep my IPs off of RBLs. I've dealt with getting off of RBLs before (school that used their Exchange servers as their sending point), so I'm very familiar with the process and know what kind of a headache it is, especially when you're a "repeat offender". Plus, they keep me in compliance with the law (if someone opts out of receiving those emails, it doesn't even bother sending them). And then there's the subuser feature, so each of my clients are a "subuser" so that I can see who is having issues. On my actual servers, emails are sent to a queue before being shipped to Sendgrid, just in case Sendgrid can't receive them for a few minutes. Even then, 99% of the emails are received within seconds.

For business or personal email, I recommend using major providers like Google and Rackspace.

For marketing emails, the big names (ConstantContact, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, etc) handle that stuff pretty well.

[Khalifa]

If your customers use your website to send email to your reps, try sending emails locally, there shouldnt be a problem with that.

Regarding your IP address being blocked, I think most hosting companies offer dedicated IPs for like $2 a month, so that should help you resolve the problem.

And as stated above, use Aweber or MailChimp if you send out bulk emails to your list. This will help you keep your IP address safe from getting blocked.