Do you know how many letters you send on a daily basis using your outgoing mail SMTP server? Do you send close to one hundred? Or is it closer to one thousand?
Not only do you use bulk mailing to communicate with you customers and potential customers, sending them newsletters and commercial proposals, but it is also a crucial part of your entire business.
If you fall into this category, you have more than likely had to deal with the problem that “your-e-mail-can’t-be-delivered.” Anytime you have a quality, well maintained subscriber list to have between 5-10 messages out of a thousand that simply will not deliver.
What kind of effect on you business will you experience if 10-10%, or even all of your messages, fail to be delivered? This is a major problem that you may have to face if anybody has decided to flag you as a spammer.
In today’s world, practically 90% of all emails sent are considered spam. With this in mind, it is not hard to understand why most people do their best to avoid spam. In order to help customers avoid receiving spam, providers have begun to develop anti-spam filters with much stricter standards. This can cause even relevant business emails to be blocked.
This can cause you a lot of frustration. In order to help you with this problem, I want to help you make friends with anti-spam filters by creating your own outgoing mail SMTP server. Once you have accomplished this task, anti-spam filters will no longer reject your emails.
Let us first take a moment to study the diagram located below. It shows you what steps an email makes when you try to send it.
This is only true if your email list is a completely legal opt-in list and if your messages are not truly spam. If you do not meet both of these standards, the following rules will not be of much use for you.
In order to prevent your e-mails from being rejected by anti-spam filters, you need to follow 5 basic principles. The principles discussed here are designed to check your messages prior to their arrival in a recipient’s mailbox. Anti-spam filters are designed to “assign trust”. Anytime an email from a sender looks at all suspicious, the trust score for that sender is decreased and if it is decreased too far, your letter will never be sent.
Anytime you plan on starting your own outgoing mail SMTP server or plan to begin sending bulk emails, you want to follow the following steps:
- Acquire your own Static IP address
- Build a forward and reverse DNS resolution
- Evaluate Blacklists
- Construct an SPF
- Possibly construct Domain Keys
For many people these steps may seem very confusing, but they are easy to do once you understand them. With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at them.
Acquiring You Own Static IP
The majority of regular Internet providers fail to give you this just for being a customer. Typically, a floating (dynamic) IP address is assigned, which changes each time you connect to the Internet. Keeping track of the address is like trying to hit a moving target. This makes the majority of email servers reject any bulk emails originating from a dynamic IP. Therefore, your first step is to contact your Internet provider and request a static IP address.
Configuring Forward & Reverse DNS Resolution
It is also required that your local outgoing mail SMTP server is configured with forward & reverse DNS resolution. DNS resolution happens anytime a client asks a name server to locate the IP address of the person it desires to connect with. Anytime the name server in a local domain is unable to answer a client’s request, the parent server is asked to locate a server that is able to.
They work together to make a type of authentication which a true relationship between the owner of a domain name and the owner of an IP address belonging to the email SMTP server. Having this validation will increase your trust score by a lot.
It provides yet another way you can be found using your domain name should you begin to send spam. Typically, spammers and phishers do not want others to know there real name, so they fail to follow this rule. Instead, they utilize stolen or hijacked domains and IP addresses. All provider require a type of ID, like a credit card, in order to register a domain.
A and PTR-records are used to help develop forward & revers DNS resolutions. Therefore, it is important to include these records in your DNS, so then can be accessed during DNS look ups. These will also help you with work you do on the Internet. You are able to request that your provider or domain registrar do this. It will enable you to be more trusted by spam filters and various servers.
You need to understand that just because you set an “A record” of your domain name in your DNS, your Internet provider may not have automatically configured a PTR record for you. Therefore, you want to check with them to make sure they did this, because there are times that they complete this task and other times that they fail to do it.
Checking Black – List
Using a DNS query you will be able to see DNS blacklists (also known as DNS block-lists. These consist of a list of IP addresses which are stored in a different database. The blacklists are used to prohibit IP addresses that send spam from doing so. All mail servers check if the IP-address of the client that sent the message is on the blacklist. If it is, the message is marked as spam and prevented from being delivered.
If you find your email was blocked, you can check it on a blacklist site. Once you see you are on the blacklist, you can use the manual directions for removing your IP from the list (almost all blacklist sites have these).
Configuring SPF
While many of you may believe an SPF is a “sun protection factor”, it is not. It is another type of DNS record that is very useful. It indicates which hosts have the right to send emails for a certain domain. SPF assists in showing that the source IP of the sender is authorized to transfer messages for a particular domain. Anytime you send an email from an IP that is not specified, the server may block it and/or tag it as spam.
Having a SPF record will allow receiving servers to see that you are sending emails that are not intended as spam. If you are interested in using this form of DNS record, you want to visit openspf.org, which is an expert in SPF. Once you have done this, request that your domain registrar assists you in setting up an SPF. Some domains give you assistance through special wizards located in their configuration panel. These assist you in getting your SPF setup automatically.
Configuring Domain Keys (optional)
In addition to those already discussed, there is yet another inspection standard that will help you, but that is seldom used. Many people argue whether it is beneficial or not. The reason for the argument is that many providers do not check it.
Domain Keys was designed to recognize the sender of emails. This is very similar to using SPF. It utilizes added cryptography which makes it only possible for a person with the right key to be able to send particular emails.
While Domain Keys is not a spam filter by itself, you will be able to see that if you show a correct domain, all filtering mechanisms will work more proficiently. This will prevent them from classifying you as a spammer.
That is all you need to know. By following these few rules you will be able to act openly while communicating using the Internet.
You will find these rules even more beneficial if you plan on creating your own outgoing mail SMTP server. It prevents you from being blocked by spam filters who rely on trusted senders who provide the most complete and visible data.
While these rules can appear to be difficult, by following them you will see they are both easy and rewarding.
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