Wilders email notifications now contain ct.sendgrid.net URL

Sendgrid is an email sending service that I signed up for yesterday. The reason for adding it is that our email server had too many domains that refuse to accept email from us. Using a paid for service like Sendgrid allows our emails to be almost universally deliverable now.

We had just reached 20 major email domain/services that were rejecting our mail server's connections. When hotmail/outlook/msn mail started rejecting yesterday, it was getting ridiculous, so, I decide I'd start paying for a real email server instead of trying to fight this on my own. (I was losing the fight - badly.)

As for the links issue you mention, that was just the initial setup. It was taking too long to get our hostname propagated for email use in DNS. Nothing was going through, so, I went with the default where sendgrid.net sent on our behalf. However, when I rechecked the validation option this morning, it now says DNS is ready, so, I've just switched over to our own sending domain now.

New email from this point forward should have the right domain/host names. Although I did just get 1 test message out of 5 sent that still said sendgrid.net in it. So, maybe there's more propagation yet to happen. It should be resolved soon though.

 

Well, I don't really think it's that exactly. I think it's more that spam, and the methods to block it, have gotten out of control.

The type of blocking that we were subject to had nothing to do with spam folders or whether you white or black listed our emails. Nothing any of you could click in your email service could fix this problem. Our mail server was simply rejected (and disconnected) right in the initial connection dialog. They never let us even start to transfer the email to them. So, for the domains in question, the emails weren't just sitting in a spam folder somewhere. They never left our mail server.

Also, it had nothing to do with our site's domain or IP address reputation. We had the same IP address for 3 years and weren't in any public blacklists. The rejections were from a larger "IP address range" blocking method that many ISP and mail services use.

Cloud computing has made building new servers a 5 minute (or less) task now, instead of hours, or even days in the times past. As a result, spammers can also use cloud services (like Digital Ocean and Linode) to build spam engines. They get shutdown quickly, of course, but they've done so much of it, that some ISPs have taken the position that the entire Digital Ocean or Linode IP address space is flagged as spammers.

Verizon was the worst. We haven't been able to deliver to them for a very long time. And, the explanation was simply because we were using Digital Ocean. I couldn't get us whitelisted. Then AT&T became the next one. Much worse though because AT&T handles mail processing for countless other domains, not just att.net. Then a service called Cloudmark started blocking us several weeks back. A large number of ISPs subscribe to their anti-spam service. That made even more domains undeliverable. Finally, Hotmail's block yesterday was it. Once the free email services start blocking you, you're really stuck.

So, for $10/month, it looks like I can deliver email to 99.9% of domains now. I've completely removed the list of unusable email domains from the forum options. All should be usable now. So, those of you I asked to change to alternate mail services, you should now be able to switch back to the one you really want to use. That alone makes this worth it.