This document summarizes the rules for using the ALIX email service based on best practices. Please note that sending email by ALIX is a feature that can be revoked if the following rules are not followed.
General recommendations #
- Put yourself in your customers’ shoes: Ask yourself if the message you’re sending is a message you’d like to receive in your inbox. If the answer to this question is not an enthusiastic “yes”, it is better not to send the message.
- Some industries have a reputation for poor quality or even malicious email practices. If you are involved in the following industries, you should closely monitor your reputation and resolve issues immediately:
- Mortgages
- Credits
- Pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements
- Alcohol and tobacco
- Adult Entertainment
- Casinos & Gaming
- Work from home programs
Shipping address considerations #
- Think carefully about the addresses you send emails from. The From address is one of the first pieces of information your recipients see and it can leave a lasting first impression. In addition, some Internet Service Providers associate your reputation with your shipping address.
- Consider using subdomains for different types of communications. For example, suppose you send emails from the exemple.com domain, and you plan to send marketing messages and transactional messages. Rather than sending all your messages from exemple.com, send your marketing messages from a subdomain, for example, marketing.exemple.com, and your transactional messages from another subdomain, such as commandes.exemple.com. Separate subdomains develop their own reputation. Using subdomains reduces the risk of reputational damage if, for example, your marketing communications land in a spam trap or trigger a content filter.
- If you plan to send a large number of messages, don’t send those messages from an Internet Service Provider (ISP)-based address, such as expediteur@hotmail.com. If an ISP detects a large volume of messages from expediteur@hotmail.com, those emails are not treated as those from an outbound email sending domain that you own.
- Work with your domain’s registry to ensure that the WHOIS information for your domain is accurate. Maintaining an honest and up-to-date WHOIS registry demonstrates that you value transparency and allows users to quickly determine if your domain is legitimate.
- Avoid using a no-reply address, such as no-reply@exemple.com, as a “From” address or a “Reply-to” address. Using a no-reply@ email address sends a clear message to your recipients: you don’t allow them to contact you, and you’re not interested in their feedback.
Authentification #
- Authenticate your domain with SPF (Sender Policy Framework). This authentication method confirms to recipients that every email you send is indeed from the specified domain.
- Sign your outgoing messages with DKIM (DomainKey Identified Mail). This step helps confirm to recipients that the content has not been modified while in transit between the sender and recipient.
- You can test your SPF and DKIM authentication settings by sending a message to an email address that you have, such as a personal Gmail or Hotmail account, and then viewing the message headers. The headers indicate whether your attempt to authenticate and sign the message was successful.
Compliance #
- Keep in mind the laws and regulations that apply to marketing messages and anti-spam in the countries and regions to which you send emails. You must ensure that the email you send complies with these laws. This guide does not cover these laws. So, it’s important that you look for them. For a list of laws, see anti-spam legislation by country on Wikipedia.
- Always consult a lawyer for legal advice.