A little earlier this month several of our clients with websites contacted us as a result of being sent an email message by their website designer/manager with the subject, “Updating sending DNS for newsletters”. This is as a result of the fact that Yahoo and Gmail recently decided to start enforcing email rules that the rest of us have been following for many years, but since those two providers have a huge share of the market, when they sneeze the rest of us catch a cold.
The fact is that all domains we host are already configured to follow all the rules to ensure that your messages are securely received by destination mail servers, so you and we are already in compliance with the rules that Gmail and Yahoo have just finally woken up to.
The only difference of which some of our clients need to be aware comes up when they’re using a mass-email provider to send out mass emails. As we have long advised, even though that particular post is from only last year, we strongly suggest that mass emails be sent using a service provider that specialises in that service; NinerNet does not. Yes, we have an option in our mail server’s control panel to create mailing lists, but doing so is inadvisable unless you’re just creating a very small list of your own employees, or maybe a few of your customers … with “few” in this case being defined as only a few dozen, definitely fewer than 100. If you have more than one hundred, which we certainly hope you do, then please use a company like Mailchimp. (They’re just one example; we don’t have any sort of deal with them.) Getting many emails out to many recipients successfully is not for the faint of heart; it’s a time-consuming process involving staying on top of all of the rules to avoid spam filters that enforce those rules and deem messages as spam if they are not following all the rules. And it’s especially time-consuming to prevent spam from being sent out using those services!
To follow the instructions that your mass-email provider provides you will need to log into and check the DNS settings for your domain in the nameserver control panel, and either add the records they suggest or modify the ones that already exist. For example, your domain already has an SPF record, so you will need to modify the existing record while keeping the information that the existing record already contains. If the instructions you’re following don’t make it clear how to do that, please contact NinerNet support and we will assist you.
Thanks.
