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emailemail-spamwhitelist

Whitelisting website email so it is not rejected as spam

What are the processes I need to go through to make sure emails sent from my web server are not rejected as spam? This question is for legitimate site emails that members have requested like a daily newsletter which is generated and run in a nightly process, as well as confirmation emails.

Some of the ideas I've heard are:

  1. Making sure the server sending the mail has reverse-dns lookup turned on.
  2. Manually submitting a whitelist request to major ISPs.
Solution

  • Ok, I spend a couple hours this morning researching the answer to this question and here's what I discovered.

    DNS Setup

    1. Ensure forward and reverse DNS lookup is enabled.
    2. Ensure web server has a static IP address.
    3. Add a SPF Record

    Email signing:

    1. Sender ID
    2. DomainKeys
    3. DKIM

    Major whitelists

    1. ReturnPath.net
    2. Goodmail

    Conversations with major vendors

    1. Yahoo
    2. Google
    3. AOL: aol.com, cs.com, netscape.net
    4. MSN: Hotmail, Live.com, MSN (uses ReturnPath.net certification)
    5. United Online: Netzero, Juno
    6. Verizon
    7. AT&T: att.net

    Other helpful information: Deliverability.com



    Here's some good info if you're looking to off-load this to a provider:

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3746213/sendgrid-vs-postmark

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4798141/sendgrid-vs-postmark-vs-amazon-ses-and-other-email-smtp-api-providers