Whitelisting website email so it is not rejected as spam

email email-spam whitelist
Micah B. picture Micah B. · Apr 13, 2010 · Viewed 14.1k times · Source

What are the processes I need to go through to make sure emails sent from my web server are not rejected as spam? This question is for legitimate site emails that members have requested like a daily newsletter which is generated and run in a nightly process, as well as confirmation emails.

Some of the ideas I've heard are:

  1. Making sure the server sending the mail has reverse-dns lookup turned on.
  2. Manually submitting a whitelist request to major ISPs.

Answer

Micah B. picture Micah B. · Apr 13, 2010

Ok, I spend a couple hours this morning researching the answer to this question and here's what I discovered.

DNS Setup

  1. Ensure forward and reverse DNS lookup is enabled.
  2. Ensure web server has a static IP address.
  3. Add a SPF Record

Email signing:

  1. Sender ID
  2. DomainKeys
  3. DKIM

Major whitelists

  1. ReturnPath.net
  2. Goodmail

Conversations with major vendors

  1. Yahoo
  2. Google
  3. AOL: aol.com, cs.com, netscape.net
  4. MSN: Hotmail, Live.com, MSN (uses ReturnPath.net certification)
  5. United Online: Netzero, Juno
  6. Verizon
  7. AT&T: att.net

Other helpful information: Deliverability.com



Here's some good info if you're looking to off-load this to a provider:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3746213/sendgrid-vs-postmark

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4798141/sendgrid-vs-postmark-vs-amazon-ses-and-other-email-smtp-api-providers

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