How would you do it?

Server Config
1

Having recently lost a potentially sizeable contract through the recipient not receiving my emails (and having no other form of contact) - If you wanted to send an email to someone that you had never emailed before and you wanted to take every step possible to ensure that they received it, (let’s just keep this simple, assume no telephone numbers or other forms of contact for them!), and assuming that you wanted it to go straight to their inbox and not via their spam/trash/bulk folders first, what would be all the steps that you would take please?

2
  1. Send it in plaintext, not HTML format
  2. Use no images (which you can’t in plaintext, but I just thought I’d say it)
  3. Do not SCREAM, SCREAM, or SCREAM
  4. Do not use words like “free” a lot

This might also be helpful: http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-spam-filters-think

3

Yep, all the obvious ones, but how about other things, like domainkeys, spf, etc, etc?

Any other ideas?

4

mx records ?

5

senderID ? ? Anyone here ?

6

MX records don’t help in making sure your e-mail gets delivered in the inbox; those are just there to set up the server so you can receive e-mail and have nothing to do with sending e-mail.
But, while we’re talking DNS, you might want to look if the reverse DNS of the IP you’re sending from is correct for the e-mail address you’re sending from.
So if you’re e-mail is from example.com and the mail server is on 1.1.1.1 the reverse DNS of 1.1.1.1 should contain example.com

And yes, senderID, SPF, domain keys, etc help. They were made specifically to help make e-mail not recognized as spam.

7

many ways there are of it…

8

I wouldn’t send it from my own rinky-dink server.

9

Errr, yeah - thanks for that!

10

Is it possible to send from another server ?

11

Thanks Scallio - much appreciated. Good to know the insdie info on this. One thing, how exactly can I do the bit in bold below please?

12

A little elaboration – that means using either a pretty good sized mail service (eg – google apps for domains for your domain) or a major public email hosting service and not SMTP via your own (or any other) web server.

13

Set up google apps for your domain as your mail service for an easy win

14

Many thanks - much appreciated.