What if ... you couldn't send Email to your customers?
Also, why I have 72,841 unread emails in my inbox (no, I'm not a psychopath)
TLDR
Here's the juice if this article is Too Long and you Don't want to Read the whole thing.
In this case my client had a wicked combo - emails to Google (Gmail) weren't getting delivered at all and emails to other services were getting dumped in Spam or junk Email folders. About half of their 2,000 address mailing list was on Gmail and the rest spread across various services like Yahoo or providers like Sonic/Comcast. This was terrifying because their weekly email marketing campaign determined all their business for the subsequent week! Wirepine suited up and got it sorted:
Here were the services in play for end-to-end mail flow in this case. Mailchimp originated the emails, responses went to a hosting provider for the company’s domain name and finally DNS for the domain was hosted by a third provider. There were a couple of things going on:
First problem - Google changed up their spam/Junk Email algorithm tightening things down and some DNS records were incorrect/missing that Google started to use to verify email senders. To fix this I had to create a few additional DNS records with the correct entries and make sure they were working with Mailchimp and Gmail. I'll give you some more details on what these are and how to fix below in the SPF, DKIM & DMARC section below.
Second problem - one of the mail relays used by mailchimp at the DNS provider had been blacklisted as a spammer. These databases flag known spam engines and most email servers will check them when receiving email. To fix this I had to get the server cleared off the blocklist by contacting them and going through some additional validation steps.
Third problem - the email templates for the campaign had gotten cluttered over the years and were getting caught up in both service and client spam filters. Formulas for identifying and tagging Spam are necessarily secret (else the bad spammers would figure out ways around them) there are some commonalities. Fortunately, there are services that will parse through your email and score it with suggestions to fix up the problems so you can clean it up before it goes out. It's typically stuff like text/image ratio, headings/fonts - generally stuff that's easy to clean up. I used these guys to fix this one - send them your email and they'll score it for free.
SPF, DKIM & DMARC
Sender Policy Framework is an extension to the protocols used to send/receive Email. It lets the receiver confirm the validity of the domain registry where your emails originate from. It acts like a digital signature confirming the email sender is legit. If it's not configured correctly, chances are recipients of your Emails are going to flag them as scams/spam. You can go DEEP on these three horsemen of the spampocalypse if you want more info. This article is a good overview (baby bear) this one covers all minutiae (mama bear) and if you want to go full poppa bear here's RFC 7208!
SMTP
Email was originally built by and for academics so they could collaborate on research across the globe within a discrete number of university email systems. Maybe send a dad joke or two. Simple Mail Transport Protocol was built to support this and is still the plumbing behind every email sent or received. When the internet blew up, no one started over and wrote the Complicated Mail Transport Protocol. SPF along with DKIM and DMARC are great adds to SMTP but there remain fundamental characteristics of email that make it easy to use for evil. That's why I have over 72 thousand unread emails.
For one thing it’s easy to spoof or send emails with the appearance they come from someone else. What you see in your email client is a display name which may have nothing to do with the actual address the mail is coming from. For example, the display name may be Amazon Customer Support but if you click into the actual address it’s baddude666@peanutbutter99.jelly420.com. Lots of times these are loaded with links that when clicked collect info from you so don't even open those! Then there are increasingly dumps available of customer lists including emails that spammers farm to send stuff to you and bypass spam filters - again don’t read or just delete. A few years ago I escaped Comcast and created a couple of new Email accounts - a primary and a secondary. I use the secondary one to sign up for subscriptions and the like. I'm pretty vigilant using the primary one only with people/services I trust and it's stayed pretty clean. The other one gets more and more spam because companies will sell/leak your emails. My old Comcast account is just silly - 100% spam and lots of it.
So while it might take a few tricks to keep your email humming, there are a many resources to help and it’s a great way to reach your customers.