Email Deliverability

Email deliverability is very tricky (skip the tools below for a longer write up). We need to know who is not receiving the email (the email address) and what type of email is being sent / not received.

Typically, the sender is our agent and the recipient did not receive the email.

What type of email is not being received?

Are we on any blacklists? Check here:

Different Types of Email Problems:

Email address trust (one person is having an issue from their specific address)

You can run a  test here to see if a specific email address has been blacklisted anywhere. This is the reputation of the individual email address and this can be a problem if an individual is sending spam (lots of batch/bulk emails that aren't helpful) or if the individual's email address is very new and they start sending TONS of emails immediately.

Email domain trust

We don't have any long term problems with this (thankfully) but this is a real bastard of a problem if it becomes a problem. This is when multiple email addresses on a domain get flagged as spam so the providers spam the entire domain. You can run searches  here and  here on domains to see if there are issues. Our domains are green.

Email domain malware problems

So this was a fun one that I've never experienced before and happened this week. Our website was hacked and they injected malware on it. I discovered it b/c Texas National Title started rejecting emails sending from @ bramlettresidential.com. The good news is that the malware was easy to fix using a company  sucuri.net that we've always had an account with. We're now going back to the email providers who put us on the list due to this. The other good news is that it's a small % of email providers who track this, so we don't have to worry about google or outlook, who combined have greater than 95% of the business email out there.

IP Address trust (what's going on with  icloud.com  and  me.com )

Emails are sent from different email SMTP servers. When you send from workspace/gmail, it's going through Google's SMTP server. When you send a batch email, it runs through Sendgrid. When you send property alerts, it runs through Sendgrid. The great majority of users are on either a business email (which google or MS manage to a huge degree) or are on gmail or outlook (or something else managed by MS). Google and Microsoft have sophisticated spam filters that we are compliant with and don't have problems with (Claire's being the exception). Until yesterday, I had no idea that we have issues with some of the smaller providers ( icloud.com and  me.com are the biggest of the small market share providers). Using the same tools  here and  here, you can check your IP address to see if you've been blacklisted and we have problems with both Sendgrid IP addresses. This is what I'm now digging into to fix.