Your email delivered – but really

You may have noticed, the delivery of your email has improved! Over the past few weeks, our team has been busy routing your outgoing e-mail through our new outgoing e-mail cluster. The result is worth it! All of our services now mail outbound through this new cluster. What this means for you and how it works in the background read below.

Since I started working as Product Owner of SQR.NL early last year, I, and we as a team, have the ambition to do better than “the rest. We do this with a number of pillars: clear prices, good service, a comprehensible self-service portal, communication in understandable language and services you can rely on. For example, we constantly monitor the prices of our domain name registrations and change them downward with the market (okay, sometimes upward too), our support team gets a 9.1 on Trustpilot and you can literally build and trust our services.
So you can trust us to continually improve our systems to make your life easier. So that you spend less time on peripheral issues and more time on what matters and what you are good at!

We always deliver your e-mail like this

To deliver your e-mail successfully, a good e-mail must meet a number of conditions. In this article, I will address three of those conditions: SPF record must be correct, the sending server must not be blacklisted, and the e-mail must be correctly DKIM signed.

1. Enable SPF for your domain name

With SPF, you tell the Internet who is allowed to send e-mail on behalf of your domain name.
Read colleague Maïra’ s background article on SPF if you want to learn more about SPF.

2. Establish a good reputation

A domain name or computer system can be blacklisted when a Web site is hacked or the password of a mailbox guessed.
If you are blacklisted, the e-mail sent will most likely not arrive or, even more annoyingly, end up in the recipient’s spam folder. There goes your (own) reputation!
Fortunately, once the problem is fixed, one and all are quickly removed from the blacklist and e-mail can be sent normally again. E-mail sent in the intervening minutes or hours will not be delivered or will end up in the recipient’s spam folder.

How we ensure a good reputation

To prevent our systems from being blacklisted due to a bad reputation, we have made a change to all systems that send e-mail. All these systems now send their mail centrally through our Antispam and Antivirus platform.
To make this happen, we have extended our Antispam and Antivirus service so that the platform is not only active for incoming e-mail but now also for outgoing e-mail.

Some background information about the platform

The platform consists of two physically separate environments in Amsterdam. In case of failure of one of the environments, the other can seamlessly take over the work. The platform runs virtualized on VMware in high availability mode on our own hardware and in our own data centers. The software used is provided by our partner SpamExperts and comes with a comprehensive Dashboard that every client has access to. So far, 272 million messages have been processed (with no problems!) and we have stopped 72.22% of incoming email. The system performs excellently which made it a no brainer for us to start expanding with outgoing email functionality.

What this means for you

In addition to delivery security through better reputation, this technically means that the email you, or your website, send is now routed through our central AA platform. Every outgoing e-mail is checked for spam properties and passed if not classified as spam.

3. Sign your email with DKIM

With DKIM, we all monitor the authenticity of sent e-mail, making the chance of phishing e-mail ever smaller. All (*) outgoing e-mail is provided by us with a DKIM key so that from now on your e-mail is always signed with a DKIM key.

A 100% score for your sent emails!

That’s what we do it for.
Provided your domain name has an SPF record (read more about that here ) your outgoing email now gets a 100% score!
This means your email will always arrive from now on! (as long as it doesn’t look like spam then ? )

Do you have further questions about SPF, your reputation on the Internet or DKIM? Then send me an email!
And would you like to protect your own email platform with our outbound antispam and antivirus platform? That too is possible.

Finding out your own email score

Test your email score HERE for free via mail-tester.com

* Our Hosted Exchange service is currently still excluded from DKIM