At SwimTopia, we send hundreds of thousands of emails each season on behalf of our customers. We’ve improved email delivery by putting a lot of thought and effort into making sure each message reaches its intended recipient’s inbox and doesn’t end up in the their spam folder.
Today SwimTopia is rolling out a change to the way that we send email that should even further improve our email delivery and protect more messages from being flagged as spam.
How has SwimTopia Improved Email Delivery for Teams?
Before this change, email sent from SwimTopia would usually be sent as being “from” the currently logged in user’s email account. This had the advantage of making sure the “from” address was familiar and that replies would automatically go to the sender. But it had the disadvantage of making the message more likely to be categorized as spam.
As of today, all messages are sent with the name of the sender from a team-specific email address at swimtopia.com. In addition, a special “Reply-To” header has been added to the message so that replies will still be delivered to the sender’s actual email address.
Before:
From: Janet Doe <janet.doe@megamail.com>
After:
From: Janet Doe (via SwimTopia) <notifier+sharks@swimtopia.com>
Reply-to: Janet Doe <janet.doe@megamail.com>
We append “(via SwimTopia)” to the friendly name in the from address to make clear that the email address is routed through SwimTopia to avoid confusion with the sender’s actual email address.
Why are we making this change?
By sending all email from an address with the @swimtopia.com domain we are able to provide additional proof that the email is legitimate and not spam. This proof is provided via the DKIM and SPF spam-prevention technology standards. Given the way these technologies work, we can only certify as authentic email messages sent from our own domain.
As more and more email providers adopt spam prevention technologies like DKIM, SPF and DMARC, messages that do not provide the same level of authentication look more suspect and are more likely to be classified as spam.
These technologies help reduce spam and prevent fraud by detecting and rejecting email that pretends to be from your bank or another website you might visit in attempt to trick you into divulging your passwords or other confidential information.
We realize that making changes to anything as fundamental as email is not to be taken lightly. We’ve only made this change after reviewing the best practices in the industry and consulting with email deliverability experts. From that exercise we’ve come to the conclusion that only sending authenticated email from domains we control is the best way to ensure the delivery of our customers’ messages.
We hope you’ll agree that while this change results in some cosmetic differences in the way the email appears in the inbox, making sure the email reaches the inbox in the first place is of paramount importance. We hope you like this new and improved email delivery system. If you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@swimtopia.com.
