What does this mean?
The standard email setup in MeetMax is a shared account. Emails are sent by "meetmax.com" and the sort of checks that email clients do - as part of their spam tests - are satisfied as meetmax.com.
But it means that any kind of email suppression can affect all Clients. And while MeetMax's mailing reputation is high - it is shared by all clients. Any Client wanting a higher still reputation should consider a premium email account. And DMARC protection of your own domain cannot be employed.
What is a premium account?
It's a dedicated sub-account on our email smtp server, with a dedicated suppression list, activity list - everything.
It's set up in conjunction with a specific domain (eg xyzcorp.com) so that mail is seen as being sent by that domain. As a result - the SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks will get better scores because they will match the domain of the sender ([email protected]).
And it has a dedicated ip address - which is the basis of email reputation. As such, it will be completely unaffected by any behavior of any other Client of MeetMax
What are SPF, DKIM and DMARC?
SPF (Sender Preferred Framework) - determines if the machine sending the mail was legitimate and authorized to do so.
The receiving server (eg gmail, or a corporate mail server) looks under the hood of the email it receives and finds the domain of the "return path" within the header. It then looks up the DNS record for that domain - and a text record documenting the SPF policy, which lists ip addresses or domains allowed to send email for that company. And it compares that policy with the ip address of the machine the mail was sent from.
MeetMax mail always passes that - but does so by using meetmax.com as the return path domain- even for mail "coming from" [email protected]. This is not as rigorous as using xyzcorp.com as the return path.
DKIM. DKIM checks the authenticity of the message itself - and especially that it has not been fabricated or altered. This check is based on a key pair for a domain. The private part is used by the email sending machine (Sendgrid for MeetMax) to add an encrypted element to the email header based on information within the email itself The public part of the key is on the sending domain DNS - so the receiving email server (eg Gmail) looks up the public key and uses it to decrypt the element in the header to check it corresponds to the email data received by the server.
MeetMax always passes the DKIM test because we use our own DKIM pair for meetmax.com. This is not as rigorous as using xyzcorp.com to hold the DKIM pair - since [email protected] purported to send the mail.
DMARC DMARC builds on SPF and DKIM - and in particular to protect the sending company (xyzcorp) from having phishing mail sent using its domain. It adds further tests for whether domains in the email headers show "proper alignment". The receiving server then looks up the DNS of the From domain in the header. And looks for a DMARC policy tells it what to do with mail that fails the DMARC test - kills, ignore or quarantine.
This protects that domain (eg xyzcorp.com) from having bogus emails sent purporting to come from its employees.
MeetMax has a DMARC record - but this only works for mail sent by a meetmax.com sender. So [email protected] - this works perfectly. But [email protected] - this does not work. IF xyzcorp.com has a DMARC policy - Carol's emails may fail. If it doesn't - it just removes one of the checks Gmail likes to perform.
Reputation
Email is sent from IP addresses, which serve as unique identifiers of email streams. As stated above, standard meetmax account send from a shared IP, which means multiple companies use the same IP address to send their email.
Clients with higher email sending volume will benefit from a dedicated IP address that belongs only to their organization.
Your domain reputation is based on your sending domain instead of your IP address. This means that your brand takes precedence when it comes to ISP filtering decisions.
The recent move from email servers (eg gmail) has been from using primarily ip reputation, to using a combination of ip and domain.
