Tech-Vets

2 Responses to “TV-2012-09-10 #086”

1. Mike says:

   September 10, 2012 at 10:23 pm

   Hey Mike,

   Great show tonight… We re-set up DKIM and SPF a couple of months ago, and our delivery rate has improved dramatically.

   In a nutshell,
   • SPF verifies to the receiver that the server you send from is allowed to send e-mail for your domain.
   • DKIM does something very similar, but it also signs the message cryptographically, making it more authoritative.
   Using these two tools, your e-mails are much less likely to be marked as spam. They also prevent other spam servers from forging e-mails as if they’re from your domain (and getting your “from” domain name blacklisted) when sending to other people.
   There’s another tool called “DMARC”, also configured as a TXT in your DNS that will send you the results of e-mails sent with envelopes from your domains on a daily basis back to you to tell you whether or not your e-mails were marked as spam, and of any forgeries of your from domain. It lets you monitor the success rates for e-mails you (or your customers) send to their clients. (Possibly an upsell for you, too, if you want to offer e-mail delivery monitoring to your clients).

   Lastly a great tool for checking if everything is set up properly, and whether or not your e-mail looks spammy: send an e-mail to check-auth@verifier.port25.com to get your spam results.

   All of this is super-easy to set up with either Google apps or Amazon. Takes a little more legwork if you’re doing it manually on your own mail server.

   I hope that’s helpful to you. If you have any questions, let me know.

   —
   Corey Fruitman
   Sales & Customer Support
   1.888.838.4050 (Toll Free USA and Canada)
   1.416.871.4725 (International)
   http://www.instanthousecall.com

2. Nate says:

   October 3, 2012 at 6:48 pm

   Good comment Corey… I just sent a long email regarding this to Mike before realizing you already posted this. Hopefully the info gets to the air on the next show, as I think, regardless of whether or not you believe SPF works to protect you from spam on the inbound side, it is an absolutely neccessary step to help ensure delivery of your mail to other organizations.

Leave a Reply