Whitelisting website email so it is not rejected as spam

email email-spam whitelist

14,231

Solution 1

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

DNS Setup

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

Email signing:

Major whitelists

Conversations with major vendors

Yahoo
Google
AOL: aol.com, cs.com, netscape.net
MSN: Hotmail, Live.com, MSN (uses ReturnPath.net certification)
United Online: Netzero, Juno
Verizon
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

Solution 2

Take a look at the service these guys offer

Mail Chimp

In most cases it ends up being better to just integrate with their API. I run a website myself and use their services and they are way better than anything i could write myself.

Even if you don't use mailchimp take a look at the contents of one of their emails and pretty much copy it - then it should go through. I think you need to collect a few details about your user such as their name etc and personalise each email.

Also, think carefully about the amount of emails you will be sending. If it's enough for your ISP to blacklist you then you may end up with no Tinterwebbage.

Hope this helps

14,231

Micah B.

A C#, MVC, SQL, Web and Windows developer with over 17 years experience in the software development industry with extensive experience in architecture, design and development of secure, high-performance applications, including e-commerce applications, with a variety of standards based technologies. Have worked as a consultant for years directly with high level managers and executives of various companies. I’ve learned their vision and direction, and to analyzed business needs to make recommendations for custom development solutions and integration with existing systems. Have worked with high capacity production databases with up to 500 million rows. Have worked primarily SQL Server, but I have also worked with Oracle and MySQL. Have performance tuned databases, using replication, de-normalization (as well as indices) and other methods to give high-speed access to large data sets. Have several years of experience using Microsoft Azure PaaS and IaaS cloud solutions, including writing applications that run on multiple servers and handle requests for transactional operations while maintaining data integrity with optimistic and pessimistic concurrency.

Updated on April 18, 2022

Comments

Micah B. about 2 years
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.
Stephan Muller over 13 years

No, it says that GMail itself does not whitelist senders. That's something else than not being able to whitelist senders manually. You can do so by creating a filter (Settings -> Filters) for a sender and mark it as 'Never send to spam'
Micah B. over 13 years

Also, for maintenance, you'll want to add an NDR recipient in SMTP server settings, or check the bad mail directory, and monitor the emails that come back.