Whoever thought that something as simple as mail could become so complex? Spammers, hackers and other folks that seem to be bent on wreaking havoc on the rest of us have now forced hosts all over the world to implement larger and more complex layers of security to protect themselves and their customers. What does that mean to you and your store?

ClickCartPro and EuropaCart have very nice mail systems built into them. A simple visit to your System/Mail/Mail Messages menu in your admin will show you the many choices available to you for the various messages your store creates each and every day. If you want to review, edit and configure the email messages sent by our software, this would be your first place to visit.

Use Your Domain Name in Mail Addresses

If your site is www.dogpolishers.com then, in order to ensure your mail goes through, you should really set up your store to send mail from some.address@dogpolishers.com. Many of you set up your stores originally using a gmail, yahoo or other large mail provider as your email address. In today’s new world of security, that will no longer guarantee that your mail will go through, unless you’ve configured the software to use an SMTP connection to the remote service for sending mail.

Simply set up a some.address@dogpolishers.com email address with your host and then edit the email messages listed in our ecommerce software, and make sure that you replace all instances of your old email address with your new some.address@dogpolishers.com address. Make sure you also can retrieve and monitor this email address daily, as it will be the default email your customers receive when they get order confirmations. When they ask questions, they will come to that address.

Don’t Send Email Blasts Using Your Host Server

Nothing gets you on email blacklists faster than sending out a newsletter to 500 or more addresses. While up through and including version 8 of our software does have the ability to send email blasts to subscribers, using this functionality in today’s world puts you out there to be blacklisted. Kryptronic highly advises against using any software on your host server to send email blasts. All it takes is one customer to report you to their provider as a spammer and your mail IP can be placed on a blacklist. For those who have suffered through this, there is no bigger pain in the neck.

There are great and affordable services for sending mail to large quantities of customers monthly. It is their business, so they monitor things, maintain your lists for you and are diligent in making sure your mail goes through. Usually, you just provide them with a list of email addresses and then they have a simple interface that you input your newsletter. We have worked with iContact, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp and EzineDirector, if you need advice, just call or email.

Using a Dedicated IP Address

Many hosts force you to send mail using a shared IP address (shared with all of the other domains on that server). In a normal world, this would be fine, but in reality, you end up sweating whether or not anyone else using that IP to send mail gets blacklisted. If some over-caffeinated marketing genius sends out a news blast offering free dog polishers to the first 100 respondees and gets reported for SPAM, guess what? You are also now on the blacklist and unable to send mail to some blocks of your normal customers. Check with your host about your own IP address for mail. If they don’t offer that plan, consider contacting Kryptronic Managed Hosting. Even some of our more affordable hosting packages offer you the ability to request a dedicated IP address so you’re no longer in the mail cattle car. Just call us or Click Here.

DNS, MX, SPF and the Like…

The world of mail also brings technical fun terms like SPF Records, Reverse Lookups, MX Records and more. So ask your host to verify that all of your settings are correct if your mail is an issue. In today’s world your DNS has to be set up correctly with proper MX and SPF entries to ensure you mail is not treated as SPAM.

The world of mail is ever-changing and evolving and we’ll do our best to keep you up to date. Have a great 2015.