#39: Email Deliverability

At first, none of the Feel Good writers got their contract emails, so we asked them to check spam and as suspected, our emails had been flagged. Thankfully, JJ wrote a guide on “How we improved email deliverability at Paystack”, so I shared this with Tomiwa and he used it to fix the issue.

I started out by checking my wuruwuru email score on Mail Tester. An email score is a number that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns to an organisation that sends emails. The higher the email score, the more likely an ISP will deliver emails to the inboxes of recipients on their network

Mail tester scored my email a 7.5 out of 10 and highlighted reasons why the emails were delivered to spam.

To get the email score to be a perfect one, I had to fix these three issues mail tester highlighted:

• Update wuruwuru’s DNS (Domain Name System) with the SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record. The SPF is an authentication method that lets the recipient's email service provider verify that the emails with ‘wuruwuru.com’ were indeed sent from the wuruwuru IP address.
• Create a DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) record to either accept, record or quarantine emails that failed the SPF or DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) authorisation.
• Remove the IP address from the SORBS (Spam and Open Relay Blocking System) blacklist

Opemipo updated the DNS with the SPF and DMARC record.

I created an account on the SORBS’s website, clicked on the “Delist an IP Address” button and followed the instructions. The regular delist process didn’t work so I reached out to their support team to get it fixed. This article guided me through the process of delisting the IP address from SORBS.

We’re still waiting for SORBS to remove us from the blacklist issue but updating the DNS was enough to get us out of spam.