Delivering email is easy. Having that email actually get received is freaking hard. In this era rife with spammers, if you don't jump through several hoops of verifying yourself, your messages will be automatically marked as spam during transit, and never see the light of an inbox. I didn't realize how tricky this was when I first started sending out email for Outspokes, but when our account activation and notification emails were always being delivered to the spam folder, I dug deeper and learned quite a lot. Follow the jump to save your future emails.
Before I share my personal experiences, I want to point out that the fastest and most sensible way to guarantee good email deliverability is to have someone else do it for you. Rather than setting up your own mail server and coming up with a solution that you have to maintain yourself, there are smart dedicated teams working on this problem on your behalf. The cost of entry is so low that they're all effectively free until the volume of you email you need is large enough that you should generate enough revenue to cover the cost. I'll cover a few hosted services like Sendgrid, and Postmark in a separate blog post.
Now that I've warned you of the easier path, here's the steps I took to make sure our emails were actually delivered rather than canned outright.
This is important when you're using a hosted environment. Outspokes uses Rackspace, and the initial reverse lookup of our IP address yielded a very spam-like looking domain:
67-23-23-207.static.slicehost.net
From the control panel, I changed this value to a more sane-looking 'outspokes.com'. To see what your current reverse dns entry is:
dig -x 67.23.23.207 # your static IP address
# other useful commands
dig outspokes.com ANY # show all DNS records for outspokes.com
dig @ns1.editdns.net outspokes.com # ask editdns for outspokes records
SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework, and is a DNS record that can be looked up to determine what servers are allowed to send email for a given hostname. For example, for Outspokes, I only wanted the server with the static IP 67.23.23.207 to be able to send email. If a spam server tries to send email with a 'from address' of outspokes.com from a non-verified server, then that email will be marked as spam and rightfully zapped from existence.
In your DNS, add a TXT record:
v=spf1 a mx ~all
This allow servers listed in A and MX records to send email. Some DNS services don't support adding TXT records, so your mileage may vary for getting this setup.
DKIM stands for DomainKeys, and works similar in concept to SPF. I followed a guide from the Ubuntu forums to get it setup.
aptitude install dkim-filter
generate rsa keypair, put in /etc/ssl/private/dkim/private.key
edit dns add TXT record with public key
edit /etc/dkim-filter.conf, /etc/default/dkim-filter
edit /etc/postfix/main.cf - add smtpd milter (mail filter)
/etc/init.d/dkim-filter start
/etc/init.d/postfix restart
If you've followed this guide blindly up until this point. Chances are good that you're emails are still getting spammed-out. Luckily, there are tools that help you diagnose whether all these new changes are actually making a positive effect.
One great way to test is to pretend that you're a mail client sending an email and telneting to the mail server directly. I learned this from a Slicehost tutorial.
# I ran this directly from the mail server b/c of firewall rules
telnet localhost 25
HELO localhost
MAIL FROM: jerry@outspokes.com
RCPT TO: check-auth@verifier.port25.com
DATA
Subject: test
body text
.
QUIT
Now you can email anyone you'd like for testing, but it's much more helpful to email check-auth@verifier.port25.com, or auth-results@verifier.port25.com. These two emails will check your mail headers against your DNS records and give you a rating of how likely your emails will be marked as spam. The report will be sent to the 'MAIL FROM' field.
Now that you have a good baseline setup for your emails to be delivered, it's time to take a breather and marvel at how your messages actually make it past spam filters. But spammers are constantly improving their game, so having a baseline setup far from guarantees that your emails will be safe forever. Here are some additional tips that may mark your message as suspicious.
Send multipart email instead of only HTML email: send an HTML version that includes your pretty graphics, but also send a plain text version that gets the same point across.
Shrink size of images in message - large image implies spam.
Use a real email address instead of noreply@yourdomain.com - By real address, I mean an address that can be delivered to. This could be admin@outspokes.com, or support@outspokes.com.
Quick listing of links that I read:
Like I said before, I strongly believe that the right thing to do for email deliverability is to have someone dedicated handling it. For small teams with limited resources, this means going with an external hosted SMTP service. On the other hand, if you're curious about how email works, setting up your own mail server and going through the setup for ensuring the messages get delivered can teach you the fundamentals of how email work and also a lot of practical tools to go along with it.