I’m in the process of working with a friend on a new online store, and it’s been very interesting to be “practicing what I preach” with site design, user experience, SEO, open source tools, blogs, video, and social media strategy. And it’s been a huge amount of work — more than I expected. Soon I hope to have something to show you all, but for now I thought I’d update you about email black lists.
Ampersand’s been around a long time, and we now route our email through google apps but we used to run our own postfix server. Once or twice we were slow on a patch and I remember one weekend we got targeted as a relay. We recovered quickly and our email domain has never been blacklisted thank goodness. Once you go into a blacklist it can be difficult if not impossible to get out, and you just go dark and silent to the world as if you had lost your physical voice. I.e you avoid this at all costs.
So in setting up the new company and domain, you want to take prudent and proactive steps to prevent this from happening. I did a bit of research into best practice these days to keep your email safe. Here’s some learnings:
- Don’t be a spammer (duh)
- If you run an email newsletter or do any sort of email campaign, use a professional service like iContact, Campaigner.com or ConstantContact to do the mailing for you. First off, they will manage a “safe unsubscribe” link for you, so if someone doesn’t want your email they can get off it easily and permanently. And two, they do all the pacing, queueing, etc.
- Next, categorize any other servers that are likely to send out email. This probably includes wherever you have the email hosted, which may or may not be the same as where you have your site / e-commerce app hosted (in my case these are two different ISPs)
- Insure that your site DNS A record points to the IP address where the main server is hosted. You’ve probably done this anyway.
- If you can, make sure that the reverse DNS lookup on that IP address points at your domain name. This probably means opening a ticket with your hosting provider.
- Create a SPF record and add it as a TXT record to your DNS. SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework, aka RFC 4408, and is a way for you to identify which internet hosts are allowed to send email coming from your domain. There’s great resources explaining SPF at the SPF project page, including this very cool SPF generator wizard. Run the wizard to create your SPF record, and drop it in your DNS, what could be easier?
I gleaned a fair bit of this advice from a gmail help page for bulk email senders, combined with some organic knowledge and stuff I’ve picked up from meetings, events, peers and the good search engine marketing folk at SEMNE who know a ton about keeping your nose clean and your rankings up in the wild wild web.
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