Spam is an irritating and ever present concern in the modern digital world and has also significantly changed the way email is handled technically. It's not surprising of course given the huge problem that spam has become with approximately 46% of all emails sent world wide being reported as spam.
The status quo
Gone are the days where you simply set up your domain style email (email@yourdomain.com.au) and happily started communicating with people. Today there are many technical checks and balances that need to be adhered to before your emails will even be accepted by mail servers around the world.
Email checks & balances
- Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): Security certificates that provide security by encrypting your emails.
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): Authenticates your email, ensures it isn’t altered in transit and prevents email spoofing (emails with a fake sender address).
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF): Ensures that the sender of the email is allowed to send from that domain/IP.
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC): An email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol.
- Pointer record (PTR): Also called Reverse DNS this ensures the IP address matches the sending domain name.
Once all of your technical checks and balances are in place you can now start to send emails with confidence. This however does not mean that your emails will always reach the inbox of the intended recipient as you now have to contend with spam filters.
Spam filters
Mail servers will generally use one or more spam filters. These filters sift through every email sent/received and use a variety of measures to attempt to determine if the message is real or spam. If the email is marked as spam it will either be moved to the recipients spam folder, discarded entirely or may even block you from sending emails to them.
Spam filters not only look closely at your email setup (eg: DKIM, SPF, DMARC & PTR) ensuring everything is correct. They also scrutinise how many emails you send and the email content using algorithms and AI to try and determine if the email is real or spam. Emails with too many links, inappropriate text to image ratios or containing certain attachments (along side many other checks) may cause an email to be marked as spam.
Third party email services
Due to the world of email sending becoming more technically challenging, many users have opted for the use of third party services to send domain style email on their behalf. These third parties include Google, Microsoft/Outlook and SendGrid amongst many others. Simply put the third parties will envelope your email in theirs and forward it on for you. These services are effective at ensuring your checks and balances are in order but they are not exempt from the actions of spam filters. In fact much of the world's spam actually originates from Microsoft/Outlook and Google accounts and their mail servers are blacklisted by leading spam filters regularly.
You will also need to pay a subscription fee to use these email sending services.
So what's the best solution?
Using your own local mail server has some very distinct advantages.
- Emails will be encrypted with SSL and have DKIM, DMARC, SPF and PTR correctly set up ensuring they will be accepted by mail servers.
- Your emails will show that they come directly from you providing confidence of authenticity by the recipient (Eg: not a third party sender).
- Your email reputation is up to you and cannot be influenced by others (Eg: Microsoft/Outlook & Google mail servers are regularly blacklisted by spam filters as many of their customers send spam). As long as you do not send spam you will not be flagged as a bad sender.
- No third party subscriptions to pay.
- Local tech support should any issues arise.