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Best Practices for Sending Bulk Email

Are you a business which actively promotes their services via bulk email sending? Or maybe you have a personal blog you use to keep in touch with old friends and like to send them a newsletter with all the new and exciting changes in your life? Then you are probably familiar with the difficulties of getting your email successfully received in the recipients’ Inbox rather than their SPAM folder. If that is indeed the case, then this article is for you. We have synthesized a list of email writing guidelines according to all the big email providers’ best practices policies, so you don’t have to spend your time researching.

Start with your hosting account

Before you even begin sending emails, whether bulk or not, you must first ensure that you have enabled all mechanisms which will raise your domain/IP address authority as an email sender. That can be done by enabling the DKIM and SPF records usually located at your hosting account’s control panel.

While hosts usually allow you to enable/disable DKIM and SPF records yourself, you may need to contact your web host/email provider and ask them to set them up. Here at WebHostFace, we let you control and manage your own SPF and DKIM records with a few clicks from cPanel.

Set up rDNS

Reverse DNS records, also known as PTR serve the purpose of confirming that your IP address does indeed point back to your domain name. Some web hosts offer tools for their clients to be able to set those themselves, but most of the time you’ll need to contact their support team and request that they do it for you. If you need rDNS setup for your account with us, please contact us via our Live Chat or by opening a ticket and we will gladly help you out.

General guidelines

  • Use a consistent IP address to send bulk mail.
  • Keep valid reverse DNS records for the IP address(es) from which you send mail, pointing to your domain.
  • Use the same email address in the ‘From:’ header on every bulk mail you send.
  • If you send both transactional and promotional mail relating to your organization, you should separate mail by purpose as much as possible by:
    • Using separate email addresses for each function.
    • Sending mail from different domains and/or IP addresses for each function.

Subscription guidelines

Each user on your distribution list should have opted to receive messages from you in one of the following ways (opt-in):

  • By manually checking a box on a web form, or within a piece of software.
  • Through an email asking to subscribe to your list.

Unsubscribing guidelines

A user must be able to unsubscribe from your mailing list through one of the following means:

  • A prominent link in the body (usually at the botttom) of an email leading users to a page confirming his or her unsubscription (other than confirmation, no other input from the user should be required).
  • By replying to your email with an unsubscribe request.

I hope these guidelines will keep you way away of people’s SPAM folders but in case your emails are bouncing back due to SPAM concerns, feel free contacting us at any time so that we can do our hosting magic on you. You can also post your questions and thoughts of the article down in the comment section, and share it with friends that might find it useful.

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Boyko Cholakov

Boyko is a little bit of a Linux junkie. We tried keeping him away from this drug for a while but at the end of the day - why fight your instincts? You can always count on him providing insights and digging deep to find the core of your issues, exterminating them like an annoying weed in your garden.

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