Posts Tagged ‘email deliverability’

31
Dec

How to build enterprise email solutions

   Posted by: Vinod Chacko    in techie

How can we have a good quality email server for a SMB or what are the things to be checked before going with a solution which a provider offers ?

It is quite a difficult question to answer or we may ned to consider many aspects before doing so. But we need to check the following things before going with a provider.

1. Server uptime : –

Email servers should be working all the time – we cannot afford our mail server being down at the  peak of our business hours. So it will be better to go with a company who offers good uptime. Anything above 99 % uptime ( server and network ) is a good value.  ( check for some online reviews or ask a few existing customers. )

2. Good Support

Go with a company which offers  good quality, quick and friendly  after sales support. ( check for some online reviews or ask a few existing customers. )

3. POP / IMAP support

There are many providers in the market who provide POP and IMAP support, which you can choose or switch at any time you need.  Now a days, there are providers who provides emails which can be accessed via  Mobile / iPhone / PDA etc  ( Push mail )

4. Data Backup

eMails are quite vital for your business and you may need to refer your older mails at times.  So, you need to have backups of your email data safe, so that you can restore what is lost, if any catastrophe occurs.

5. IP reputation

Think about a scenario, if your corporate emails are detected as spams and many major email servers are blocking it ? Yea – that happens many times. Major reasons for this to happen are

  • The IP of your mail server have a past history of spamming and the MSPs consider them as spams again.
  • Your email server is compromised and is being used for spamming.
  • You are on a shared server and some one else is spamming.

6. Backup email server

Think about a network outage and your email server is inaccessible for a long time. In digital world, outages ate inevitable.  The successful ISPs are those, who have a backup plan and bring the outages to a minimum. If the outage happens at your business hours,  you will loose all the mails and the business will be badly affected. If the network issue is outside the responsibility of your provider – you can do nothing.

So, what you can do is to set up a clone of your mail server, may be in a different continent ( theoretically ), so that the network to one server is down, that to the clone server will be still up and it will serve your emails. Once the primary is back online, it’ll automatically sync the data to each other.  This sounds to be a bit complex set-up ;-) .

What will happen if both are down ? There are options to set a third mail server as  catching point for the mails, when all of your mail servers are down and if any one of them comes up, this server will push it to the one which comes up.  All these setup will involve quite a lot of tweaking in the DNS and email server..

7. Spam Control

Will you believe that the almost 80% of mails that are circulating are spams ? So, I wont be surprised if I see a lot of incoming spams to a server. We can only implement filters and spam checkers  which can minimise the spam mails entering your inbox.  So, a good email solution should have an inbuilt SPAM control mechanism.

8. Easy Scalability

We should be able to scale what we have to a fair extend so that we can leave the once configured mail server aside.

I believe these are the major things we should consider before we go with an eMail solution for an enterprise.


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11
Nov

MassMailing — Best Practices!

   Posted by: Vinod Chacko    in techie

In this generation, where the computers are the best friends of humans and internet is the best tool, every body will be having atleast one email ID. And due to those ‘green’ thoughts that has crept into many people’s mind, every one is trying to avoid papers as far as possible and so is the companies and email is now one of the strongest medium of communication.

There are many many websites are offering newsletters ( daily , weekly , biweekly monthly etc etc )  – and we might have noticed many of our legit mails fall into the spam box of the recipients.

Have you ever thought what makes a mail spammy ? Or why a mail is considered as a spam ? To understand that that we need to understand what an email is.. Basically every email have 2 parts, one is content and another is header. Content is what matters to the recepients and the headers is what matters to the server.

The header contains many information like

  • the IP from which mail was sent
  • the original sender ofg the mails
  • How the mails were sent
  • If there is any authentications implemented ( like DK or SPF )and many more..

Back to our topic, there are basically two ways to scan an email to check if it a potential spam.  One is to scan the headers and other is to scan the content. If we can scan the header and see if it a forged email, then we can easily detect if it is a spam or not ( the probability for such a detected mail to be spam is high )

On the other hand, we can scan the content for suspicious keywords like … you know that :)

Next is RBLs.. Many email servers like yahoo, comcast, AT&T etc depends on 3rd party to see if the IP from which an email originates is a vulnerable or spammy one. ie if the IP have a poor reputation it’ll badly affect the deliver-ability of your email. There are so much of blacklist agencies awailable today and mjow of them are spamhaus and spamcop. And SenderScore keeps the reputation of your IP.

What are the things we need to implement when sending mass emails ?

1. Send emails only to those who need it. By doing that you eliminate ( or lessen ) the possibility or probability of emails getting marked as spam by the recepients.

2. Use authentication mechanisms – by implementing aSMTP, SPF, DomainKeys or DKIM, we can publish the authenticity of our mails.

Refer here for a sample aSMTP mail

3. Use dedicated IPs to send emails

4. Implement a unique PTR record

5.  Do not retry failed addresses.

6. A Valid unsubscribe link

7. Your contents are important

– dont include any HTML forms, java script , embedded objects in your mail

– Use links to domain names , not to IPs.

These are the major steps we need to check before sending mass emails. If we follow this , I dont think we dont find our newsletters or any thing in the spam boxes :)

Courtesy: The Antispam policy of yahoo, gmail and many other major MSPs.

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