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Sending Newsletters for Third Parties
Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 9:24 am
by pixelfused
I'm working on a small system for my company that allows us to manage and send out newsletters for our clients on a regular basis. One of the things we would like to do is have the email come from
customer@customerdomain.com instead of an email address at our domain. I'm using an authenticated SMTP connection on our side, but when I just change the From: and ReplyTo: headers, the message seems to hit spam filters, where normally the message would not.
Is there any way to do this without looking like spam?
Re: Sending Newsletters for Third Parties
Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 9:29 am
by Chris Corbyn
The other domain needs to have an SPF record which permits you to send on it's behalf. This is a pretty simple thing to do if you are able to change DNS records.
http://www.openspf.org/
Re: Sending Newsletters for Third Parties
Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 9:38 am
by pixelfused
wow, that was fast. Thanks.
Is this the only way? I've looked at the constant contact system before, and I can't imagine they ask their user to add an SPF record.
Re: Sending Newsletters for Third Parties
Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 5:10 pm
by Chris Corbyn
This is the only way. Not all services will pay attention to an SPF record, but most of the big ones (hotmail, yahoo..) will. You have to see the reason why. Would you like it if Joe Spammer was able to send out millions of v1agr4 emails using your email address? That's what SPF tries to prevent.
That other service most likely didn't have a high success rate on delivery.
When you sign up for a Google Apps account to use Gmail with your own domain name they ask you to change your SPF record too. It's a fairly standard practise.