Sending Emails from Applications
Sending emails over the Internet is being shaped by a large number of standards. These standards are primarily intended to ensure confidentiality, integrity and authenticity. Compliance with these standards ultimately also increases the deliverability to the designated recipient of a message.
Current situation
It is striking that, in contrast to the development and release, the application of the standards is in the hands of large players such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google without a higher-level committee. For example, Google has announced a stricter approach towards senders of more than 5,000 emails per day from February 2024. Comparable measures are only rarely communicated by large providers and are often implemented in very different ways.
It is difficult for smaller providers and their users who do not specialize in sending emails to always meet all requirements. This can lead to systems or their IP addresses being placed on blocklists, which means that delivery to the designated recipient is no longer possible.
While sending transactional emails for order confirmations or resetting a password usually causes fewer problems, sending mass emails can quickly become a challenge.
Email delivery via an external provider
It should be mentioned at this point that Postfix, the Mail Transfer Agent pre-installed on Nine systems, is not offered as a Managed Service. There is no monitoring of the email queue or of rejected messages (bounces).
To ensure that sending of emails works smoothly, we recommend using a specialized service provider for business-critical applications. This offers several advantages:
- Reputation of IP addresses: No effort is required to establish and maintain the reputation. In addition, the IP address of the Managed Server remains unaffected by blocklists.
- Sending via SMTP or HTTP: Many applications and frameworks offer configuration options for SMTP servers. Most email providers also offer an HTTP interface, which can simplify sending from self-developed applications.
- Compliance and adaptation to changing standards: In addition to common email authentication methods such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC, this also includes more specific, content-related standards such as the required List-Unsubscribe Header when sending newsletters according to RFC 8058.
- Evaluation: Deliverability and statistics in general can be visualized using dashboards
- Support with technical questions regarding email delivery