I am developing a course registration website in Django. New users must confirm their email address by clicking on a link emailed to them.
Unfortunately, this message is consistently ending up in people's spam folders. What steps can I take to prevent this from happening? Should I include an unsubscribe paragraph? Should I send less mass mail from my site (I occasionally send out a message to 500 emails.)?
Most Spam checking these days is Bayesian, which means that that your message is checked using a fuzzy algorithm that tries to guess if resembles known Spam or Ham (good) messages (mainly by checking the frequency of common spam words and phrases).
It is better to send an individual message to each recipient, rather than using multiple addresses in the BCC field because many spam filters (and many ISP's) automatically flag multiple recipients as spam.
Messages sent from a mail server running on your computer may be flagged as spam because some mail servers will try to contact the source IP of the sending server (which will fail with a local IP address).
It would appear that some of the big mail hosts such as Hotmail will recognize when an identical message is sent to a large number of subscribers at one time so you should stagger the delivery of your messages [...] to send your messages in small batches.
What's a reverse PTR record? It's something your ISP has to configure for you -- a way of verifying that the email you send from a particular IP address actually belongs to the domain it is purportedly from.
What's DomainKeys Identified Mail? With DKIM, you "sign" every email you send with your private key, a key only you could possibly know. And this can be verified by attempting to decrypt the email using the public key stored in your public DNS records.
To be honest, SenderID is a bit of a "nice to have" compared to the above two. But if you've gone this far, you might as well go the distance. SenderID, while a little antiquated and kind of.. Microsoft/Hotmail centric.. doesn't take much additional effort.
SenderID isn't complicated. It's another TXT DNS record at the root of, say, example.com, which contains a specially formatted string documenting all the allowed IP addresses that mail can be expected to come from.
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