Entrepreneur's Guide to Email Delivery | Hacker News Reader

Entrepreneur's Guide to Email Delivery

zohrob.com

35 pointsrantfoil5 comments

Part 2 is a lot more useful (http://zohrob.com/posts/entrepreneurs-guide-to-email-deliver...). Part 1 basically says, if you want to run a mail server, use a dedicated IP for it. Part 2 actually goes into the anti-SPAM technologies that will make your messages appear as non-SPAM.

One thing that I would add to the section on SPF: don't say that any mail not coming from your domain is SPAM. It's a bad plan. Use it as a way to gain non-SPAM points if it does validate, but don't say that mail not coming from your servers is SPAM definitionally. Why? Because more and more people are forwarding mail and most mail forwarders do NOT rewrite the chain in a way that preserves SPF. Basically, if you deny all other domains, many people who forward their mail will see your emails as SPAM.

We had the same experience when setting our SPF records to FAIL ("-all"). It turned out many more people than we expected forwarded our messages and had spam-flagging problems as a result.

I'm curious if anyone who uses SOFTFAIL ("~all") can comment on how well it works? I see it in wide use now despite warnings that it's not appropriate for production use. Curiously, Microsoft's SenderID wizard calls the SOFTFAIL level "Discouraged" (meaning, mail from non-matching domains is discouraged) with no mention of its intended use for debugging.

The world email system is broken... Makes me wonder about proposed "solutions" such as the mini-charge per email sent. I'm not sure I see the fix in this post, but at least it's forewarning us about some temporary workaraounds - and some helpful education. Just one more issue for providers of web services to get up to speed on :(

AuthSMTP was mentioned at Y!Hack a few weeks ago and I'm using it now in a webapp with great success.

AuthSMTP is a nice idea and I would pay their rates if they were metered like Amazon's Web Services. The problem is that I often don't know how many emails I'll need to be sending. For example, let's say they had a simple charge of $0.001 (one tenth of a cent) for each email sent plus $0.005 (one half of one cent) per MB sent. That would work nicely (and be in line with what they currently charge).

The problem is that I have to decide on what plan to buy. AWS' model works nicely in that it works for a tiny bit or a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com