My emails are not being received. Need advice.

[surveydan77]

Hi everybody. I run a website that requires a member to signup in order to use our program. Our members are then sent a confirmation email which they must click the link on in order to proceed. (double opt in)Many of our emails end up being classified as spam or even automatically deleted by different email hosts. We have members writing our support to complain that they never received the verification email, etc.

Does anybody know of any steps to take in order to insure that less of our emails are being sent to spam or being blocked? Is there somewhere to register the site that will help with this? Any advice is appreciated.

[Steerpike]

I guess the first question is how are you sending the mails?

Also, what values are being put into 'sender' 'title' and 'return address' fields for the email?

[Mall23]

You can check here:
[dnsbl.org...]
DNS Providers Blacklist

[redzone]

Start from the top level, is your hosting company blacklisted.

DNSBL is just one of many blacklisting sources:
SPEWS
SORBS
Spamhaus

are a few of the other majors, though Spamhaus ROKSO tracks the true spam kings, the Spamhaus SBL is a popular source for blacklisting..

SORBS and SPEWS are less used, as they are zealous in their efforts, and not only block the offending IP's that spammers deliver from, but surrounding IP's, and entire Class C's and /20's in some cases. Their premise is, penalize everyone at the host, so the host will be forced to cease doing business with any spammers...

Once you determine that your host is not blacklisted, then it's time to check your mail. Does your sending IP have proper reverse DNS, is SPF configured correctly.

Next step is content filtering. There are mail appliances and software filtering technology at the router level of most major ISP's. Brightmail is one of the most popular in use (Hotmail), and specific issues with your email could be causing content filtering, and your mail gets "blackholed". Doesn't bounce, doesn't deliver, goes into the "blackhole" never to be seen again.

Deliverability is getting tougher these days, as spammers have ruined it for everybody. Don't trust your host telling you that your mail is getting sent properly. Check Google groups (email abuse), and search your host out, IP's, /20's etc...

Nobody will watch over your email deliverability better than you!

[surveydan77]

Redzone, thanks so much for all the info. VERY helpful.