How to stop attachments going to junk email folders
As part of our service providing IT support for Companies on the Gold Coast, we recently had a call from a client, who couldn't get their emailed invoices and quotes to arrive in clients inboxes!
They had an issue where their attachments were getting marked as SPAM and were ending up in recipients junk email folders. This was a problem, as their staff were sending quotes and invoices and they were getting missed at the other end.
The fact is 80-90 % of all email on the web is SPAM doesn't help. I was able to resolve the issue by creating SPF and DKIM records for their domain.
DKIM: Domain Key Identified Mail. This key authenticates your email is from the SMTP server that sent the email. When an e-mail is sent by the server when any part of the e-mail message is encrypted, the server receiving the e-mail will verify the authenticity of the encrypted value by decrypting the encrypted value with the public key that is visible in the DNS record for the domain name. This is to check whether the encrypted part of the record matches the message. If it matches, the recipient is assured that the message is genuine.
SPF: Another type of authentication protocol where you restrict what IP address can send emails for a specific domain name eg contos.com . You add the SPF as a TXT record. Your email host should provide the text you need to add to the TXT record. once the TXT record is added, you can see it after leaving it to propogate after 24 hours. Some hosts are quicker.
TXT record Email recipients servers check the IP address of the SMTP server used to send the email. If it doesn't check out, the email is deleted. The only problem is that not all servers check the IP address before accepting the email.
These are the sort of jobs we get from our Managed IT support Services customers. They call up with the problem, and we investigate, then apply the solution. In this case, the client called and said they were having problems getting emails with attachments through to THEIR clients inboxes. We investigated, then found that their website team had not added SPF and DKIM records. We then contacted the domain name and website host, and asked them about adding the. As the emails were hosted as Hosted Exchange, we contacted the Email host, who added the DKIM, and then provided the details for the SPF. I then added the SPF record (as a TXT record), at the domain name host.
After following up with the client, they were happy to report the emails were now going to inboxes, no the junk email folder. and we marked the ticket as solved.
[caption id="attachment_2970" align="aligncenter" width="962"] E.g of SPF record lookup[/caption]
Sources:
http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/email/fighting-spam/stop-emails-being-labeled-spam