Email Deliverability Basics
It is important to understand that email deliverability is not perfect - no one can guarantee 100% delivery of emails. With the proliferation of spam, every email server runs some sort of anti-spam system, and any email you send can be rejected because of something in its content, the email address of the sender, the sending server's address, or a multitude of other reasons.
To improve the success rate of delivering your emails to your members, you can: a) mark us as a trusted sender for your domain's email, and b) avoid certain content in your emails that would trigger a spam filter.
Adding DKIM / DMARC Records For Trusted Sender
When emails are sent through our system (automated emails or when you send a group email), we will send it in such a way that it appears to originate from your organization email address. This works much like any email newsletter system such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, Emma, etc. However these emails are not actually sent through your email server, so receiving email servers may reject such emails or treat them as spam, since these emails are coming from a server that is not associated with your domain.
If you have access to your domain DNS, you can add DNS records to your domain to indicate that we are a trusted sender of your emails. Go to Organization Settings > Integration > Email Deliverability, and follow the prompts to setup your DNS records.
If you are using a gmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, etc email address, then this will not work since you have no access to the domain DNS (those domains belong to Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc). We highly recommend you setup email hosting for your web domain, then use an email address associated with that domain you control.
Note: If you had added SPF/DKIM records for sendgrid.net based on our instructions prior to Jul 1 2016, those records will be deprecated beginning Jan 1 2017. Please remove those old records and add new DNS records through Organization Settings > Integration > Email Deliverability.
Avoiding Content That Triggers Spam Filters
Depending on the recipients email provider's spam filters, you may not always be able to get email delivered to their inbox. However some steps you can take to improve the chances of getting emails delivered:
- Avoid keywords that are commonly associated with spam. Words like "free", "discount", etc. There are several spam keyword lists available online if you run a search for "spam keyword list".
- Avoid links in your emails. If you do have to have a clickable link, it would be better to have the link text match the link URL. A common technique of some spam emails masquerading as a legitimate email from a bank, etc, is to provide a login link that actually goes to a different URL than what is shown in the text. So having the link text match the actual link URL would make it appear more trustworthy.
- Avoid embedding images, especially if you have very little text in the email.