Email Blues
Published November 25, 2020
Last week I realized I was having a pretty serious problem with email.
My business emails weren’t getting to GMail users.
For a business, this is a pretty bad problem. Luckily I have been wanting to move away from my Digital Concierge brand and was already planning on using michaelhelmke.com as my mail website and business identity. So all I had to do was create a new email set up for myself under that domain and I was ready to go.
(In reality it took a few hours but it was just a bunch of button pushing. Set up the domain at my email provider Rackspace, set the right DNS records to both verify ownership of the domain and make the spam filters friendly, and start switching some initial stuff over to it.)
I still have a lot more subscriptions and organizations to switch over to the new domain but at least I can communicate again.
What went wrong?
The websites I manage all need to send email when someone fills out the “contact us” form that exists on most web pages.
For most people using WordPress for their websites, the company that provides the internet connection also has email turned on so the website can just send out messages.
Setting up an email server, though, is very difficult. The way I have my WordPress sites set up, there is no native email enabled. I use a very low cost service called MailGun for email sending. Each WordPress site is set up to use that to send any communication emails.
So far, no problems.
To do this properly, each WordPress site I manage should be set up to send email via MailGun using it’s own MailGun identity. But because I’m lazy, I kept sharing the same identity I was using for TheDigitalConcierge.net, my business website and business identity.
This isn’t inherently a problem either.
Except for this. If you have a website with a contact form, there are robots on the internets which will try to send you spam messages through your contact form. You can minimize this but if you don’t do anything, you’ll get a certain amount of message spam coming in.
Well, this has been happening for the websites I manage. And some of my clients have gotten tired of the messages and not really knowing where they are coming from, have marked them as spam. From their GMail accounts.
So now GMail thinks there’s a bunch of annoying email coming from TheDigitalConcierge.net. My own business email domain.
This is a problem.
The solution is twofold.
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Add Google’s free reCAPTCHA service to all contact forms so you have to solve a puzzle like identifying all of the busses in little pictures before you can submit the form. This solves the problem except for anyone who is using really cheap overseas labor to send their spam. Some people are.
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Set up a separate MailGun account on their own domain for each client. However, this only spreads the pain around.
A better solution I’ve seen and am considering is to have two domains for your business. BusinessName.com is your marketing domain. Your website is here. Your business person to person email messages come from there. BusinessName.net is where you send from on your website and certain transactional emails. It isn’t foolproof either.
Email is a problem
Email is hard to get right.
The spammers have ruined it for a lot of us. Email is incredibly effective for marketing and, of course, for sending legitimate messages. But email’s inherent design flaws which go back 50 years or so make it really hard to keep spam and noise free.
For now I should be ok. I don’t anticipate having to play Domain Name hopscotch. This was a good lesson and gives me some things to consider when I’m advising on marketing solutions.