The independent mail-tester.com service gives our email message, sent through Enudge, a 10/10 score for deliverability (01/07/2019). This article describes how we did it, and importantly, so can you!

Email deliverability is a continual technology battleground where the war between spammers and con artists, and those trying to deliver safe and legitimate emails, means that the weapons needed to combat the enemy are regularly enhanced. Unfortunately the business who needs to ensure their message is received by their customers becomes the innocent civilian harmed by the ongoing battle.

At Enudge we are constantly reviewing the delivery of emails sent using Enudge into the Inbox. Our 10/10 result required the following more recent configuration changes:

• DKIM - a private key and public key pair are attached to our sending domain, and the private key is used to sign every outgoing email from the sending domain, so that the receiving email gateway can verify that not only is the sender authorised to send on behalf of the domain, but that the message has not been tampered with on the way.
• DMARC works alongside DKIM; every sender must setup a DMARC record to receive reports on potential abuse of their emails. You can read more about DKIM and DMARC in this article.
• TLS - which stands for Transport Layer Security, refers to the method of encrypting emails (which are otherwise plain text and therefore subject to eavesdropping) while they are in transit. You can read more about TLS here: Transport Layer Security. All emails sent via Enudge are now encrypted using TLS.
• List-Unsubscribe custom message header. Gmail and Outlook now look for the list-unsubscribe header embedded in every Enudge email and present that at the top of the email (of course it was already in the footer area of your Enudge email). The additional link is meta information along with your email; it's presence reduces the likelihood that your recipient will complain about your email by clicking on the 'spam' button because instead they can get to the Unsubscribe button without going looking for it. This is also treated positively with respect to delivery of your emails into the inbox.
• Alt text on the email open tracking image. In order to know that your emails have been opened by your contacts, we track the download of a special image. For the purpose keeping the code in every email smaller, this image did not contain an alt text, which was causing a very small reduction in the delivery score. A blank alt (alternate) text field is now included.

 

If you don't yet have a DKIM associated with your emails, don't hesitate to get in touch so we can help you with certificate setup.

If you would like to discuss how Enudge can help you achieve a 100% delivery score, please don't hesitate to contact us.