Increase deliverability of your application’s emails
Since we spent many (many) painful hours of research understanding why systems were junking our Planypus emails, we decided to publish some of our findings.
There is no surefire way to escape getting junked but there are many things you can do to enhance your chances.
1. The biggest one is called SPF (http://www.openspf.org/) - helps you set up some special records in your DNS to tell people your mail server is authorized to send on your behalf. Check out this tool:
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/
Microsoft says: “After you implement this, we encourage you to e-mail Microsoft upon posting your SPF record to the DNS. This will help ensure your record is automatically included in our SIDF cache. Send an e-mail with your domain name in the body of the message (for example, mydomain.com) to senderid@microsoft.com”
2. There is also something called Yahoo DomainKeys but the Yahoo page on this has been taken down possibly because they are being deprecated (this is pure speculation). You will need to configure your mail server to deal with them, using this project http://sourceforge.net/projects/dk-milter/ to enhance sendmail with a plugin.
3. Make sure your headers look correct with a proper Sender attribute, matching the domain of the SPF record for the domain that is actually delivering the email (so even if your From is from your user’s domain, the Sender should be your own domain)
Sender: do-not-reply@planyp.us
4. (Not tested) Check out this tool for testing deliverability: http://deliverability.com/resources/emailAuthentication.php
5. (Not tested, but rumored) if you send both html and text emails try to ensure their content matches. This also helps to get past spam filters.
Try doing the SPF step first as it’s the easy thing to do and see if your rates improve. Please let us know if you’ve got other tricks for getting your emails treated with the respect they deserve :-)
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