Spam Email

Introduction

What is spam email ? Different types of spam email ? How to take steps to resolve it ?

Spam email is unsolicited and unwanted junk email sent out in bulk to an indiscriminate recipient list. Spam can be a result of a misconfigured mail server, compromised servers and or email accounts being compromised.

The main issue of spam email is that it would prevent your legitimate emails (transactional mails etc) to be delivered to customers and it would result in poor reputation of your company

Apart from the general hygiene of servers like ensuring security updates, having strong passwords for your email accounts and in general following the best practices of server security, we also recommend the following to ensure reliable delivery of your emails

11 Ways on how not to end up on the spam/bulk folder You don’t need to actually spam these days to end up on bulk or spam folder. It just takes a bit of patience to get out of there, there is no magic bullet or red pill to do the job quickly and painlessly. It is incredibly frustrating to deal with some largish Internet companies these days where the attitude is ‘our machines+algorithms are smarter than you’.

  1. Avoid spam friendly hosting providers - Don’t host your sites at spam friendly hosting providers. If you are on a shared hosting service don’t abuse the resources(and don’t host on a provider who lets other shared hosting customers abuse the resources).

  2. Check against some known spam blacklists.

  3. Request customers to add “From” address to addressbook - Requesting your customers to add your newsletter ‘From’ address to their addressbooks seems to help esp. with some providers

  4. Limit rate of emails - Rate limiting number of e-mails per minute is a good idea otherwise its considered DoS type abuse of services by e-mail providers, most will send you to a tarpit .

  5. Provide communication channels - Keep the lines of communication open at your own postmaster@, abuse@ addresses, list out a phone number for abuse complaints, listen to the bounces and customer feedback. Do not send e-mail from un-monitored e-mail IDs and rub it in by calling them donotreply@ or similar.

  6. Maintain logs - Logs are you friends, log all e-mail send actions in your web application.

  7. Use more sender frameworks - Guard your reputation against joe-job accusations by using one or more sender identification/authentication/reputation frameworks like SPF and DKIM.

  8. Maintain DNS reverse records - Make sure you have DNS reverse records for your MTA.

  9. Avoid DSL for bulk mailing - Never use a bulk mailing software from your home DSL connection

  10. Don’t send e-mails to uninterested customers -Most indian companies(job sites, mutual funds, banks, online travel companies with a few notable exceptions, credit card companies and most of the social networks) don’t give a damn if a customer doesn’t want to receive their e-mails or SMS’es. Don’t be like them. Differentiate yourself.

  11. Add un-subscribe option - Add ‘a one click un-subscribe’, and ability to ‘delete’ the account of a subscriber by the subscriber herself from your web-service. A non-tedious one click un-subscribe not requiring a person to login to your site goes a long way in avoiding subscriber anger and consequent hitting of [this is spam] button in frustration. Also if one is running a social network, allowing a digest style bunching of invites/referrals/shares/ratings and other communication received over a day/week.

Important Tips Postmaster@ or abuse@ addresses of large e-mail providers do respond to your requests to whitelist provided

  1. your customers opted-in to receive e-mail on the topic you are sending them e-mail, it is not ok to send marketing e-mails to customers who signed up to receive some kind of alerts.

  2. make it as easy to un-subscribe for customers as atleast as easy as it is to hit the spam button, see point 11.

  3. Honest mistakes(say your server got cracked and sent out a million ‘viagra’ e-mails) are forgiven more easily than willful spamming.

  4. Get expert help and Contact Us

Please note that this document is provided for the benefit of our customers and the community at large. E2E Networks is not responsible for any inadvertent issues arising out of trying out any of the advise here or using by any of the tools

In case any of your server at E2E Networks is compromised, Please note that during the entire process, we request you to communicate and kindly take immediate action to fix the issue as the lack of response or resolution of the issue would be a contravention of IT Act 2000 and would lead to disabling of the public network.