Hello from the rain forest up yonder – We’ve built this nice application that as part of the registration process, it sends a verify-email to the new account. However, we have discovered that Hotmail auto-routes our emails to the junk folder. This occasionally occurs on my Everleap domain account as well when evaluating new test accounts. To publically address the issue, we’ve written up a nice little piece in our FAQ explaining to customers to add our domain to the Safe/Trusted Senders list. This definitively helps for many users. However, Live.com, and Outlook.com in particular are apparently not delivering our email at all. Upon more investigation, Outlook.com offers ways to troubleshoot via http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx Under the Policies link, there’s a bit about “Reputation Management”; this leads us to two links – which is where I need a bit of guidance. SNDS: https://postmaster.live.com/snds/index.aspx JMRP: https://postmaster.live.com/snds/JMRP.aspx Both require IP address range. Do I remit the IP address found under General Information on the CP.Everleap.com? Or do I use the mail.mydomain.com address listed under the DNS A-Records? On the “Join SNDS and JMRP” page, the form wants to know the number for “Max complaints to send per IP per day:” I have no idea. I prefer not to get any at all Any assistance here will I think help the greater development community at Everleap. Thank you!
Any links regarding server reputation management would be for us to use. We monitor the mail server reputation pretty closely, so there shouldn't be any problems there. Where you might run in to problems is sending mail from a web application. In that case some recipient servers look at the reputation of the web server itself, which isn't as easily managed. If a site is compromised and contains anything "malicious," the web server can get a bad reputation, which can affect mail that originates on that server. We see that more often over at DiscountASP.NET where the shared servers are older and have more users. It isn't uncommon for a dozen sites on a shared server to be compromised, so it's nearly impossible to maintain a clean "reputation" on those servers. We do scanning and we contact people who are compromised, but it's a never ending cycle of clean up/re-compromise for many of those sites. We can't force people to maintain good website security. All that being said, when sending mail from a web application where delivery is mission-critical, we often recommend that people use a third party mailing service like Sendgrid or Mailgun (we have a blog post at DiscountASP.NET that steps you through using Sendgrid if you want to take a look at it). It's a problem we see more often as mail servers increasingly tighten up restrictions on incoming mail, or use questionable RBLs that blacklist virtually everything. We can, and do, maintain a clean reputation on the mail servers, but for the reasons I cited, it isn't possible to guarantee that kind of reputation for the web servers.
