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Discussion on: Fixing a DNS Issue that Makes Your Emails Look Like Spam

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nikayoda profile image
Nika Revazishvili

E-Mail services today are very smart and they score every incoming email, each piece of data is some kind of score, let's say SPF... if you are not using SPF loses score, then it jumps to other records, like content types, if email has missing plain-text or HTML, it also loses some points as if email contains both content types it has higher score, so...

  1. MX Records: SPF is necessary, but you missed other records. In case, if you forgot MX records, you are not in the same trouble as when you have SPF missing, But it also has some sort of points, why? because whenever an email is received, the email service provider will always try to find MX records, then contact the mail server and see if the sender address is valid and the server has SMTP user with the same name.
  2. DKIM: DKIM very important, more important than you think, because it is a kinda signature, if signature(DKIM) is correct, then it also means that email sender was 100% authorized on server.
  3. DMARC: It is not as necessary as other records above, but if you have it, it's more points for you.

So, idea is that as many emails are sent from the server and if all of them are correctly signed and DNS records are always correct, both IP Address and the Domain name will warm up and it'll increase deliverability from time to time. so keep in mind to always add all records correctly, not only SPF.

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rpalo profile image
Ryan Palo

That’s a lot of info, thank you so much! Looks like I’ve got more research to do :)

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nikayoda profile image
Nika Revazishvili

But warming process is hard anyway, both domain and IP needs warm up process to show email service providers that, domain is for real use and not for spam, spam detection is even harder than dns records, with GMAIL and Microsoft Office 365 (or outlook.com), they have AI system that also scores each world + each sentence to analyze what is email about, there are stop words and sentences that you have to avoid if you are first time sender and ip+domain reputation is nearly zero, then when both are warmed up you can use whatever you need but you must try to reduce stop words anyway, because while warmup requires weeks and months depends on email volume, to waste reputation points it may require less than minutes, so keep in mind to Google for stop words, also if your mail domain is new and emails are still going to spam even though you did everything, check blacklists for IP and if there are no blacklist record then try to ask people you know to add you to their mailbox and try to communicate with them from both side and it'll slightly warm reputation to give you chance to send emails even if someone does not have your address in contact lists, but this tricks only work for major companies, for self hosted services except Microsoft exchange, only spam filter matters nothing else. But still it's good that someone tried to help people understand how email services work today because they are so complex almost 95% of email server owners have no idea how to operate their mail server correctly to avoid spam filters.