Sending Email

Mark KrugerColdfusionmuse.com

Cfwebtools.com

Email – A Common Task Used every day Reports Notification Customer

interaction Alerts Reminders

Increasingly Difficult Most Email is Spam Many obstacles exist less relevant

to the recipient Outside Your control User Experience Sending does not

match your experience in generating mail in CF or PHP.

What IS in our control….

From Conundrum Who Is It From? So… First, let’s get the “from” stuff right Add “replyto”

EXAMPLE 1 Now let’s add a “sender” using

cfmailparam EXAMPLE 2

Failto EXAMPLE 3

Origins: SPF

Easiest to use DNS Based Requires the email server to be SPF

aware EXAMPLES

For Web mail? Make sure your relay IP or domain is included in the SPF record.

DomainKeys

More challenging to Understand. Excellent for getting through

Yahoo Mail Requires relaying through a

“signing” application EXAMPLE Yahoo mail EXAMPLE Server

Black Lists

What can be blacklisted? Domains IPs Subnets

How do you stay off? Challenge every time Obey the rules

Checking Sender Behavior

So far we have been analyzing how well the user follows the “rules”

One technology analyzes how the sending mail server behaves

GRAYLISTING

Analyzing Content

Finally there is the content Spamassasin Declude Postini Barracuda

How to lessen the impact of Content Filters Only send legitimate content about

legitimate subjects. If possible, avoid sales and marketing speak. Make your content valuable to the user.

Use the Name field in addressing your email. (Sally <sally@nosehairsolon.com>).

Avoid excessive or obscure-looking links in the message body.

Avoid any appearance of obfuscation. For example, don't use any links that might appear deceptive or dishonest.

Lesson the impact of filters part 2 Test your emails – both online and desktop

tools can assist you with this. In our company, we created a web service that passes messages to our SpamAssassin server and returns a score.

If you send HTML email, make sure it has content in it and not just images. Use well-formed, semantic HTML that identifies the nature of your content rather than just its layout.

If you send HTML email, make it multi-part and include a plain text section.

Lesson the impact of Filters Part 3 Use fully-qualified domain names in URLs

and image tags. Avoid using IP addresses. Do not include any forms or JavaScript. Check out some of the published tips for

individual giant email domains like Yahoo and Hotmail.

Make changes to your messages on a regular basis to stay ahead of the curve on filtering. This becomes especially important if your messages feel like marketing.

Miscellaneous

Handle Your Bounces Make Sure you have a Reverse

Record Lock Down your relays

Resource Links Sender Policy Framework (SPF) http://

www.openspf.org/ DomainKeys Identified Mail http://www.dkim.org/ SpamAssassin (part of the Apache projects) 

http://spamassassin.apache.org/ Graylisting http://www.greylisting.org/ Yahoo’s Best Practices for Email

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/postmaster-15.html

FCC Information on CAN-SPAM http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/canspam.html