Email is essential for business, sending emails from the same domain as your website demonstrates you're serious about your organisation, and it's increasingly crucial to getting your emails delivered.
How much does an email account cost?
Free email accounts may be free but they come at a cost. Whether it's your broadband provider where the cost is included with your service or a generic one from a tech giant, the impression they give is that it's a personal or disposable generic one. As phishing and spam increase organisations large and small are increasingly filtering out and rejecting these types of accounts.
How can you demonstrate your emails are worth reading?
You demonstrate you're serious about your business by sending emails from your domain. You'll be taken more seriously, adding weight to your business, and reinforcing your business name every time you communicate with your clients and prospects.
How can you get your message delivered?
You can ensure your email gets through by using DMARC to authorise and authenticate your emails with SPF and DKIM. Organisations are increasingly using spam and phishing filters to reduce abuse and DMARC, SPF and DKIM are increasingly required to ensure your emails get delivered.
How can you protect your domain from spoofing, phishing and scams?
DMARC, the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance is designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorised use, commonly known as spoofing, phishing and email scams, it uses SPF and DKIM to achieve this.
What are the essentials to trusting email?
The two essentials required to trust email are: SPF confirms an email is sent from an authorised source, and DKIM confirms that the email is from the sender and hasn't been tampered with. Together these ensure your emails are trusted to come from you.
How can you authorise who is allowed to send your emails?
The Sender Preference Framework (SPF) is for authorisation and defines where your emails can be sent from. By identifying who can send emails for a domain and authorising just those sources it's straightforward to identify if an email is coming from an authenticated source and reject emails that come from unauthorised sources.
How can you ensure your emails are sent from you and haven't been tampered with?
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) cryptographically signs your emails in a way that ensures your recipients know your email is from you and hasn't been tampered with along the way.
There are other methods of increasing security and ensuring privacy such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) and S/MIME but these tend to require technical knowledge and are less popular.
How can I manage sending emails to a group of people - mass communications?
By using a Mailing List Manager you can offload most of the work to recipients. Lists can be public for the many or private for a select few, they can be easily managed either by you or the recipient themselves including adding themselves, pausing when they're on holiday or remove themselves from the list with the minimum of fuss.
How can you manage sending mails to groups of people?
Sending an email to a few people is easy, mailing list managers such as Sympa solve the issue when that number grows and the administrative overhead of adding new users and removing those who wish to pause or unsubscribe becomes more of a burden.
How can you be One-Click Unsubscribe compliant?
By using a Mailing List Manager your recipients can unsubscribe at any time. Most countries have laws about marketing direct communications and require easy ways for consumers to opt out and unsubscribe.
Sympa adds headers to your emails so email clients can offer subscribers an option to unsubscribe, you can also add a clickable link in your footer to unsubscribe.
What is ARC-Sign?
Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) is an email authentication system designed to allow an intermediate mail server like a mailing list or forwarding service to sign an email's original authentication results.
Do I need to ARC sign emails?
Sympa mailing list manager includes Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) when appropriate.
Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) did not solve the problems with email reputation, and it has been suggested by the IETF that ARC should no longer be used. Email is constantly evolving and some aspects might be incorporated into DKIMv2.