Published
2021-11-19 03:14
This month at CiviCRM North East, Rich Lott of Artful Robot spoke about how to improve email deliverability and avoid your mailings being marked as spam.
As we discovered, it is quite a complex topic but Rich did a great job of explaining the technicalities.
Rich answered questions such as:
- How do you prevent your emails from being rejected as spam?
- What is the difference between bounce and block?
- How to set up an inbox to capture details for automatic replies/out of office responses to bulk email as well as undeliverable emails?
- Would you recommend running your own mail server or using a third party service?
You can watch the full talk here:
Here are some useful links from the talk:
- A good place to start is the CiviCRM user guide: CiviMail
- Mail Tester - a useful resource for testing your own emails
- The false promises of dedicated IPs - the pros and cons of sending from a dedicated IP
And here are some helpful extensions:
| Extension | Description |
|---|---|
| Refine mailing | Segment an existing draft mailing leaving two separate, identical mailings except for their non-overlapping recipients, which can then be adapted to the segments appropriately before being submitted. |
| Email union | Compare email bounce performance by domain, sharing aggregate data with other CiviCRMs to help diagnose problems and identify the best SMTP providers. |
| Resend mailing | Select a pre-existing mailing and send it to your search results. |
| Mosaico message templates | Enables you to use CiviCRM Mosaico templates with scheduled reminders, personal messages, etc. |
| Test send message templates | Simple administrative helper to send yourself a message template for testing purposes. |
| Message template tools | Adds a message template preview to the message template admin page and a print letter form. |
| Keenies | Custom search framework that allows you to e.g. find people who've opened or clicked an email in the last month. |
| Mailing tracker | Graph and list your last 6 months' mailing performance statistics. |
| Chassé: supporter journeys | Allows you to set up email "journeys" made up of a sequence of email message templates sent out at pre-defined intervals. |
| Email AKA | Dedupe contacts with duplicate email domains e.g. me@gmail.com or me@googlemail.com. |
| Email Amender | Automatically corrects email addresses as they're added according to common misspellings. |
It's hard to avoid using acronyms when talking about this subject, so here is a quick guide to the most used acronyms:
| Acronym | Description |
|---|---|
| IP = Internet Protocol | The basic protocol of network communication. |
| IP Address | Think of this as the postal address of your website represented as 4 numbers - e.g. 45.79.135.8. |
| DNS = Domain Name Service | Translates human readable website domains into IP addresses - e.g. civicrm.org = 45.79.135.8. |
| SMTP = Simple Mail Transfer Protocol | Standard communication protocol for email transmission. |
| SPF = Sender Policy Framework | An email authentication method designed to ensure that email comes from who it says it comes from. |
| DKIM = Domain Keys Identified Mail | Similar to SPF, allows the receiver to check that an email from a specific domain actually came from that domain. |
| DMARC = Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance | Builds on SPF and DKIM to provide greater protection against email forgery. |
Our next meeting is scheduled for 9 February 2022. If you'd like to join us, sign up here: CiviCRM North East - Feb 2022.
Comments
Thanks for the list of extensions, I haven't been keeping up!
Here's my contribution to this topic, framed as nine "gates" or ways that your mass mail may fail to get in front of the right people.
http://homeofficekernel.blogspot.com/2020/11/successful-mass-mailing.ht…