We send out some newsletters and other information of upcoming events etc. to our customers.
What's happening is some of our customers are forwarding out our emails to our competitors.
I couldn't find much info available on how to prevent them to forward the emails.
I found a service called Virtru that can disable forwarding but our emails are sent from code automatically and not manually.
Are the any good solutions available?
Related
I'd like to send emails programmatically via SendGrid (from admin#mydomain.example.com), but have replies to that email come to my Google Workspaces inbox for admin#mydomain.example.com). I would then like to reply to the customer from Google Workspaces.
The closest question related to this I could find is Setup | G Suite + Sendgrid for transactional email, but that was a fairly different use-case.
So in my usecase, emails to the customer would come from admin#mydomain.example.com via EITHER SendGrid or Google Workspaces.
Here's a article from MailGun that talks about a similiar pattern
My questions:
Will this result in deliverability issues, having emails sometimes come with different signing keys/domains? I don't understand email signing particularly well.
Is there anyway to have replies to the email address go to BOTH SendGrid and Google Workspaces, so I'll have it in my inbox but can also get it posted to a webhook by SendGrid? I think the answer is no, but figured I'd ask.
Any other considerations I should keep in mind for this strategy? Is this a poor idea for some reason?
Thanks!
Yes, this will result in deliverability issues. You should use the same domain for both sending and receiving.
No, you can't have replies go to both. You can have replies go to a webhook, but you can't have them go to both a webhook and a mailbox.
Final consideration: This is a poor idea. You should use the same domain for both sending and receiving. If you want to use SendGrid, you should use SendGrid for both sending and receiving. If you want to use Google Workspaces, you should use Google Workspaces for both sending and receiving. You can't use both at the same time.
Another consideration: If you're sending a lot of emails, you might get flagged as a spammer if you're sending from multiple domains.
The company I work for does something similar that might be helpful for your scenario.
We have a number of systems that send emails via SendGrid e.g. Auth0, Salesforce, various bespoke systems, etc. Some of these use native integrations to SendGrid, some use SMTP relaying, and others send emails programatically via the SendGrid API.
We've implemented sender auth (i.e. DKIM) in SendGrid for our domain e.g. mydomain.example.com, but we don't handle replies in SendGrid as we want replies to go to a different system - specifically our contact center system (which is the main systems our help desk staff use). Help desk staff would then reply to emails from within the contact center system. Note: we needed to configure DKIM for both SendGrid as well as the contact center system (as both currently send emails from mydomain.example.com), but in the future the intent was to implement a SMTP relay in the contact center system (to SendGrid) so that all sending goes through SendGrid.
I'm a bit fuzzy on the fine-grained implementation details of how we handle replies, but essentially we point the (single) MX record for mydomain.example.com to a third-party email protection system which scans the emails and forwards them to Office 365 mailboxes which subsequently forwards them to our contact centre system. I believe Office 365 is really only there for email posterity. AFAIK you should be able to point the MX record to anything that can handle SMTP.
In your scenario you should be able to configure the MX record for the mydomain.example.com domain to point at your Google Workspaces. This will allow you to send emails from SendGrid and use Google Workspaces to handle the sending and receiving of replies.
Not sure if you can configure SMTP relaying in Google Workspaces (i.e. to relay through SendGrid), but this would mean you'd only need to configure DKIM for SendGrid. All emails would be sent by SendGrid and replies would be go to Google Workspaces.
I have a problem with a web server, that also sends newsletter emails with an unsubscribe link.
Everytime such an email is sent out, the unsubscribe link is called directly. Because it could be 1000 or more email, the calls crashes the server everytime.
All emails are directly sent to Trend Micro Hosted Email Security.
First I thought, there is malware on the machine, but checking for that gave no result. I now changed the machine, but it happens also with a completly new machine.
The ip addresses of that calls are all from Amazon Webservices. I blocked a lot of this ip ranges already, but that is no góod solution.
What kind of server attack is that? What can I do, to stop or at least handle it?
I'll appreciate your hints.
Thanks
Vera
This looks like your emails are all going through some sort of email security scanning service, either on your servers, or on the recipient's servers. Typically, these scanners will also scan any links present in emails to ensure they are not malicious. There is no great solution to this. If you are scanning all your outgoing emails, you disable that, which may or may not be a good idea. See also Strategies to prevent email scanners from activating "unsubscribe" links.
We are developing an application that will send periodic updates and notifications to users as email. The user can opt-in and opt-out of this service via a subscribe option. However we are finding that some users are making the email as spam and as a result our account is getting suspended... Is there any way to track if our emails has been marked as Spam by a user, so that we can stop sending emails to them...
We have a GSuite service and are using Gmail SMTP to send emails
No.
But you can check if your domain is on any blacklist with tools like mxtoolbox.com. And contact those blacklists with the question what you could do to be removed from the list.
In order for a mail to be classified as spam it has to fail a multitude of tests maybe your mails have specific words in the title or the senders address is way to weird or the header is getting corrupted in a certain way or and maybe that's your problem: many people are custom filtering your emails as junk/spam.
I work at a university, on a project for a web driven academic management system and I'm currently facing the following problem:
Sometimes the application needs to send e-mails, most of then are sent on demand (users ask for a password recovery link, for example). Many emails for this kind of service are sent daily, and if on a peak of access they are sent massively. This has caused our email server to be included in blacklists of common email providers (like yahoo and hotmail), resulting in failures on email delivery.
What are the common causes for this kind of problem? Is it possible to avoid these blacklists? Or at least is there any good practices to follow so I can "flag" these useful emails as non-spam or safe email?
thanks for reading.
first of all, check if those messages are really sent to email addresses in your account database. maybe there is a security hole in your application that allows sending messages to arbitrary recipients. an indicator of that would be if your domain or ip is blacklisted not only at specific providers like yahoo or hotmail, but also on public blacklists like spamhaus.
("most of then are sent on demand".. makes me think.. what about the others? could they be interpreted as spam by many recipients?)
then you need to find out if your server is blocked due to
the amount of messages sent or due to the content looking "spammy".
Check your logs from the time before the blacklisting happens. Do you see many deferred messages (4xx error code), do they contain error messages that indicate too many messages from your IP?
if so, configure your MTA to throttle message delivery to those providers.
also check your mailserver setup:
correct fully qualified HELO?
matching reverse dns?
If you have DKIM , SPF and the like... are the settings correct?
finally, examine the generated messages. Do they have all required headers? Run them through spamassassin and check the result. adapt the formatting of your messages accordingly.
I sent 3 emails last week as replies from our website. None received them! One was yahoo, hotmail and an overseas domain. I am wondering if it's not a good idea to open a yahoo account with our domain name as the user just to reply to prospective buyers.
Your mail server's IP may have been black listed. This is common on shared servers.
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
First, check dnsbl.info to see if your mailserver's IP is blocked by any of the blacklists. If they are, contact the blacklist administrator to investigate removing the block.
If your email is business critical, then you need to get a dedicated server with a white-hat hosting company, control over DNS to set up your SPF/SenderID record, and to register with the Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo postmasters for whitelisting and feedback loops. Most of these will only accept requests for dedicated servers, where you have 100% control over the email they send.
If you are using an online contact form, make people double-enter their email address and check the entries match - otherwise you'll have no end of typos, which are naturally undeliverable and frustrating for both you and your customers.
You could also try looking at gmail for domains. It's what I use and so far I haven't had a problem withany spam filters. Also make sure that you are not writing the content of the message to where a spam filter could flag it as spam. There's some guides on the net somewhere. I found out that by removing the word "free" from the message the emails started going though (before I was on gmail).