Email

email.md

Email

Why is email still important?

Different types of email

• Marketing
• Transactional
  • Result of a user initiated action, order confirmation, password reset email etc.
• Drip camp
  • Marketting emails initiated by some user action sent on a predetermined schedule

SMTP

• envelope
• headers
• body

Spam

# envelope sender
mail from: [email protected]
# envelop recipient
rcpt to: [email protected]
data
# message headers
From:  Foo<[email protected]>
To: Bar<[email protected]>
Reply-To: <[email protected]>
Subject: SPAM!
Catch me if you can!
.

How ISP's/email hosts deal with spam

• Blocklists (domain/IP addresses)
  • SpamCop and SpamHaus
• IP/Domain Reputation
• Content Filtering

Things to keep in mind

• IP warm-up

  • If you are going to be sending more emails than usual it is good to let your ESP know ahead of time they can "warm-up" your IP.

• Dedicated IP's

  • SendGrid recommends 1 IP per 10-15K daily sends
  • separate IP's for marketing and transactional email

• Mail lists higene

  • low bounce rates
  • low spam reports
  • double opt-in
  • honeypots on any public email sign-up forms

• Don't buy email lists

  • Illegally harvested emails (can lead to fines)
  • Quickly get a lot of emails marked as spam (get in trouble with your ESP)
  • Other people probably bought the same list
  • Quickly ruin your repputation

Authentication (validating the sender)

• SPF (https://sendgrid.com/docs/Glossary/spf.html)
• DKIM (https://sendgrid.com/docs/Glossary/dkim.html)

(You can go without them, but you'll probably get better deliverability with)

• DMARC (https://sendgrid.com/blog/dmarc-domain-based-message-authentication-reporting-conformance/)
  • used in combination with SPF and DKIM to tell receiving mail servers what to do with emails that fail SPF/DKIM
    • nothing/quarantine/reject

Email analytics

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Unsibscribes
• Spam reports