I was recently asked about some general steps to ensure an organization’s email server is “clean.” Here is the advice for doing this (forward to your technical contacts).
- Use a service to check and monitor your email server’s reputation. A good example is MXToolBox.com:
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=mx%3atechadvice4smb.com.
You can sign up for a free monitoring service (2 hosts for free) to monitor your server for being placed on a blacklist. It gets checked daily, and they send you an email if you server’s blacklist status has changed. - Make sure you have “SPF Records” defined for your domain. This proactive tool allows an organization to state explicitly what servers will be sending email for its domain.
- You can use this tool to create the SPF record: http://www.openspf.org — look for
“Deploying SPF”. There is also additional information on SPF records. - You can check your existing SPF record using an online tool like this:
http://www.whatsmyip.us/txt:techadvice4smb.com, just change the domain name.
- You can use this tool to create the SPF record: http://www.openspf.org — look for
- Make sure your have special email accounts defined:
- [email protected] (required)
- [email protected] (recommended)
- If you have listserves or send a fair amount of email (especially marketing content), you may want to create an account with http://www.emailreg.org, but there is a small annual fee for their service. I found it particularly useful when an email server was blocked by the “Barracuda anti-spam service”.
