Checklist for letting your email reach your client's inbox

[foxfox]

Assuming automatic email sending, of coz not spam, but sometimes maybe in high volumn, e.g. member registration email

Current my checklist for those server which send out email:

1. Adding Reverse DNS Lookup entry
2. SPF
3. Domain Key
4. Clean static IP (not blacklisted)

anything else?

[bill]

A lot of people like to use a 3rd party service to send out bulk mail. That lightens your load and leaves the worrying up to the professionals.

[piatkow]

I have seen bulk services that have problems with some of the major webmail providers.

You need to test the service against mailboxes at AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail as well as against mailboxes protected by major spam filters.

Even using a bulk service you need to be aware of features in messages that trigger warnings in major filters.

[foxfox]

I don't think it is possible to outsouce the email sending to 3rd party, as the email might contains private info, e.g. Password reset link

So far I have done most of the things I can ask my sysadmin to do, now I am looking at some optimization (if possible)

e.g.

- Email encoding, Latin vs UTF8
- Valid from address : is it important?
- Proper email header, mailer name?
- Similarity in email's content for different clients

anyone want to share?

[piatkow]

It is always worth giving recipients details of your mailings when they register so that they can white list them. That will get you around a lot of issues.