All Collections
Registration
Communications
How to increase email deliverability
How to increase email deliverability

Learn various ways to increase email deliverability and prevent emails being marked as spam or junk.

Ben Dharmanandan avatar
Written by Ben Dharmanandan
Updated over a week ago

Sending a large number of emails can result in some of them being labeled as "junk" email or “spam” by the recipient’s mail server. Mail servers use a variety of methods to “score” each email. If the score is too high then your email will be classified as spam and may not be delivered.

Here are a few guidelines you can follow to reduce your spam score and minimize the risk of your emails getting marked as “spam”.

This article covers the following:

Configure SPF (recommended solution)

Email servers are likely to reject email where the address of the sending server (always "eventsforce.net" for Eventsforce emails) does not match the "sender" address on the email (example: "somecompany.com"). To solve this problem, you should add an SPF (sender policy framework) record to the "DNS record" for your web address, this tells other servers that Eventsforce is allowed to send emails on your behalf.

To do this, you will need to contact the person or organization that manages your domain (the bit that comes after the "@" in your email address) and ask them to add “include:spf.eventsforce.net” to the SPF record for that domain. You should also remove any "sender" address configured for your account (see “Sender email address to be used on all emails” in the “System Settings” screen).

We strongly recommend that you configure SPF in this way to ensure that your emails can be delivered.

Use a “sender” address if using SPF is not possible

If you are not able to configure the SPF, you can use a “sender” address to tell receiving mail servers that Eventsforce is sending emails on your behalf. To do this, change the “Sender email address” in “System Settings” to "noreply@eventsforce.net". Note that this is a system-level change and will affect all events in your account.

Using a “sender” address will greatly reduce the chances of your emails being marked as spam. There are several disadvantages of this approach, however:

  1. Recipients may see the sender address, for instance, “From noreply@eventsforce.net on behalf of someone@somecompany.com

  2. You will not receive any delivery failures as these go to the "sender" (which is noreply@eventsforce.net)

Note: Configuring SPF is a much better solution than using a "sender" address.

You may need to use a “sender” address if you have configured SPF on an event domain but not the corresponding company domain. As an example, imagine we have a company with a domain “somecompany.com” that has an event domain called “somecompanyevents.com”, and that the Eventsforce SPF entry has been included for “somecompanyevents.com”, but not for “somecompany.com”. In this case, you should configure a sender address of noreply@somecompanyevents.com.

Email Content

Follow these guidelines when designing and writing your email content.

Include descriptive text

An email containing only a clickable link that takes the user to a registration page is likely to be marked as spam. Emails with lots of images and not much text will also get a high spam score.

Adding some descriptive text to your email will help to avoid this.

Avoid linking to images

Linking to images that are held on a server elsewhere can increase your spam score. It is better to upload pictures into the email itself using the "Insert/edit image" feature in the text editor than to refer to images held on a server elsewhere.

Test your email for “spamminess”

You can use a tool to test the “spamminess” of your email content and the configuration of your account:

Send an “ad-hoc” or test email to the address given on the page, and then check the report for that address.

Whitelisting

It is possible to stop emails being rejected by individual destination servers by adding the Eventsforce mail server to a “whitelist” on those servers. There are two significant disadvantages to this approach:

  • It requires changes to destination email servers that are normally outside the control of both Eventsforce and our clients

  • It is fragile - this will stop working if the address of the Eventsforce email server ever changes

We strongly recommend that you do not use this approach. If you do choose to use whitelisting, add magenta.eventsforce.net (89.234.34.202) to your whitelist.

Did this answer your question?