The Minutiae of Mailbox Settings (and other fun stuff)

Max Dunhill
Aug 31, 2018 · 2 min read

When I started my company, I thought it would be an exercise in big ideas, brainstorming and strategy.

The reality of running a small company however could not be further from the truth.

Consistent attention to detail, as well as a constant curiosity and a willingness to have a hands-on approach to every single aspect of the business seem to explain why after four years I continue to run my business full-time.

There are two seemingly arcane aspects of running a growth company that have had a disproportionately positive impact on the business: these are correct configuration of mailbox settings at the company’s DNS and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (abbreviated to https).

By now, everyone involved in growth will likely have heard the aphorism that “Content Is King”.

So, you have a content strategy, expensive CMS/CRM/e-mail marketing systems with elaborate automation steps based on clever IFTTT principles. You start pushing valuable content to your hard-earned list of subscribers, only for that content to not deliver, or to be flagged as spam! How can this be avoided?

With an audit of your mailbox DNS records.

A useful tool for this is: https://www.valimail.com/

Then, depending on the findings of this initial scan, this article: https://www.esecurityplanet.com/applications/how-to-set-up-implement-dmarc-email-security.html

Has invaluable tips to create an initial set-up that will ensure some deliverability.

Although these steps can and should be refined on a domain-specific basis, following them will ensure that growth companies have solid deliverability in the initial stages of their content campaigns.

As for https, while some hosting services such as Heroku allow users to enable https with the click of a single button, as not all of College Connections’ site is hosted on Heroku, I found several great resources to configure https on AWS.

The first great resource is:

How to add HTTPS to your website for free in 10 minutes, and why you need to do this now more than ever (FCC)

This is definitely one of the most cost-effective ways to do this.

However, for whatever reason, moving from AWS Route 53 to Cloudflare as a DNS takes one further step:

CloudFlare S3 Website Error: 502 — Bad Gateway (Matt Button)

Aside from the obvious security strengthening provided by https, it also has SEO benefits, as Google rankings penalise websites without it.

Max Dunhill

Written by

Vipassana meditator & M.D. at College Connections. Ironman 70.3 Triathlon & Pythonista hobbyist