A lot of people have a lot riding on their emails, you’re probably not different. You can run an entire business solely through emails. You can’t really afford to have your email not working. Here are some steps you can take to ensure your emails are consistent and reliable.
Passwords
The first may seem obvious, but it is one of the most important and that is your password. It needs to be complex enough so that someone won’t easily guess it. Also you really need to make sure it isn’t on this list. A mixture of numbers, letters (capital and lowercase) and symbols is recommended to provide the most secure password. If you know you have trouble remembering passwords, then you need to be sure it’s written down securely somewhere.
You also need to be absolutely certain that all your devices with active email accounts have the most current password. Even one device setup with an old password can cause issues with our server. Resulting in an IP block, and no emails for you.
Mailbox Capacity
Another thing you need to be aware of is your mailbox’s storage capacity. As soon as your mailbox is full it will start bouncing incoming emails and blocking any outgoing emails as well. Meaning you won’t receive or be able to send. Anything you do receive while your mailbox is full cannot be recovered either and will need to be resent.
You can manage your mailbox storage from the following address – exampledomain.com.au/webmail -. From there you can login using your email address and password. in the top right you should see something like x/100mb. Click on that to manage your storage.
Mail Authentication
The last thing is in relation to deliverability. To ensure your email reaches its intended recipient, you need it to look as legitimate as possible. An email that looks like spam, will probably be marked as spam. There are certain things you can do to improve the ‘reputation’ of your domain. Adding mail authentication records (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) is one of them.
SPF
SPF verifies that your email is coming from a legitimate source. How does it do this? By specifying specific IP addresses that are allowed to send email from your domain. The only IP allowed should be that of your email provider. If a mail-server sees an incoming email from an IP that doesn’t match the SPF record it will reject it. Some servers will bounce any emails coming from a domain without an SPF record. This effectively helps mail servers’ band together to prevent the spoofing of email.
DKIM
DKIM is for your outgoing mail, when you send an email a DKIM signature is attached to it. This signature tells any receiving mail server that your email is legitimate and is safe to let through. If your domain does not have a DKIM record it may increase the spam score of your emails. This could result in them being quarantined and never delivered.
DMARC
DMARC helps monitor any emails sent from your domain, it will make sure they have a DKIM/SPF record installed. It acts like a bouncer at a nightclub, if you don’t have ID no entry. In this case, ID is your DKIM or SPF record. Any emails that it flags will be blocked. This is another preventive measure against email spoofing.
Simply installing these records on your domain increases your domain sender reputation. Which we now know, improves the chances that an email will reach its recipient. Once all three are installed your emails will almost always be successfully delivered. You can check if your domain has SPF, DKIM and DMARC here
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Should you stick to these three rules you will 100% notice the difference than if you were acting otherwise. If you have any questions about your emails please don’t be afraid to call (1300 761 930) or email us (support@hosting-australia.com).
If you had any trouble understanding any of the terms in this article please check out our glossary.
