At Antibex, we believe that using transactional email services such as SendGrid and ElasticEmail is the best choice for email marketing and email notifications. They’re robust solutions that enable you to effectively share important news and updates with your clients.
Recently, transactional and marketing email service providers have had to change their policies in order to prevent abuse of their services and ensure the highest quality results. As such, we’ve received a number of support calls about issues customers started to experience with deliverability when the number of notifications and broadcasts they’ve sent contravene the new policy. That’s why we’ve published this blog post – we’ll explain the reason for those changes and what you have to do to comply with these new rules.
Email: An Evolving Method of Communication
Ever since email became a popular method of communication, users have fallen prey to spammers and those who send abusive and malicious emails. As time went on, email delivery has evolved and thus more and more players have come onto the scene, exploring ways to exploit this technology for financial gain and nefarious purposes.
As a result, email service providers around the globe were forced to create an antidote for this ailment. They’ve created a system that depends upon an email sender’s reputation. An email sender’s reputation refers to whether you send spam or unwanted emails.
Your Reputation as an Email Sender Matters
When wrongdoers abuse email services, it hurts the sending reputation of the service provider (using their default sender domain settings) and as a result, your practice management. In order to avoid this adverse effect, email service providers started enforcing their policy of verifying sender domains.
The topic of email deliverability and sending reputation is widely covered by service providers and technology bloggers. You may want to check out the 5 Ways to Check Your Sending Reputation posted by SendGrid, Email Deliverability – What You Need to Know About Getting Your Emails to the Inbox and Email Reputation: Why It Matters and How It Impacts Deliverability.
Now, there are even such services as Reputation Monitoring and service offerings that can help you improve your sender score on the market.
The ElasticEmail service has most recently introduced this change in their policy. And now, in order to use their service without any restrictions, you will have to verify your sender domain.
Verifying the sender domain is a good practice. We talked about using your organization’s domain to send emails in our Professional Email Options For Your Practice article.
You will want to know that the best way to use the transactional email service is with your own company domain name. We covered the topic of custom domains in our Your Company Email Address: Done right! article posted in the summer of 2016.
In order to use the transactional email service with your own domain name, you will first have to verify your sender domain. This process is pretty straight forward and it’s covered in the the transactional email service provider’s knowledge base.
To verifying the sender domain for ElasticEmail, please refer to the SPF, DKIM and Tracking FAQ article. The Whitelabeling Domains guide explains the way it’s done on SendGrid.
The How to Authenticate Your Email in 5 Steps is also a great article that can help you understand the reasons and the flow on how to verify sender domain.
If you don’t feel comfortable setting this up on your own, you can hire an IT specialist to help you with this service. At Antibex Software, we do not provide such a service and our support representatives are not trained to provide this type of service. However, we can recommend someone to help you with this setup.
There is more to this topic as explained in the How Email Authentication Works article posted by SendGrid, which can better explain the importance of verifying the sender domain. We also explored relevant topics in our Gmail Users, Are You Ready For DMARC? article.
Safe and happy emailing!
