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SAAS Emailing Help

A topic related to SAAS or APPs

xmartel

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I've got a young SAAS business and we've got an issue that I'm hoping one of you has dealt with before. Our developer hasn't been a help so far.

I'll do a deeper story and lessons learned post at some point, I've got a couple businesses in the construction industry and good things are happening, but for the purpose of this post I'll just be talking about our SAAS construction business.

We're currently towards the tail end of beta and we doubled the number of users that I had wanted to get. People kept giving us money so I kept bringing more people on board for testing.

One of the biggest issues we have right now is email deliverability.

Our main support email support@companyname.net is the email used by our software to send out notifications, login details, etc.

We've found that many of our clients email providers are not receiving these emails. They aren't even going to junk mail, and if people manually add the email to their safe senders list, they are still not received.
This is not with all providers. Gmail for example does receive them. (however they get stuck into the promotions tab, so if anyone has a better way to get dropped into the main inbox, I'm all ears)
But some providers such as yahoo, icloud etc. don't get them at all.

The interesting thing is if we manually send an email from this email address, then most of the time it does get received even by yahoo, icloud, etc. Though still often to the junk box.
But if the software sends the email itself, then it doesn't get through.

Has anyone experienced this and have any ideas as to a solution?

Thanks in advance for the help.
 
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c4n

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JohnForte

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Yes, welcome to the reason places like sendgrid and AWS SES have products. You have to check your mail server's IP make sure it isn't blacklisted. Trying connecting your domain to a company like sendgrid see if that helps. Make sure your email has an unsubscribe link and follows ICANN SPAM laws.
 

xmartel

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I ran it through the spam tester. Thanks for that link.
I got a 7/10. We'll be making the adjustments to get 10/10.

One thing I noticed is the email the software is sending from is noreply
I was under the impression our developer had set it to support.
Does this make a difference? Are email providers less likely to accept a noreply email?


I haven't heard of those services johnforte. I will check them out. thank-you


@eliquid do you have any insight? I've read a number of your threads over the years on SAAS.
 
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eliquid

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I ran it through the spam tester. Thanks for that link.
I got a 7/10. We'll be making the adjustments to get 10/10.

One thing I noticed is the email the software is sending from is noreply
I was under the impression our developer had set it to support.
Does this make a difference? Are email providers less likely to accept a noreply email?


I haven't heard of those services johnforte. I will check them out. thank-you


@eliquid do you have any insight? I've read a number of your threads over the years on SAAS.

Could be several things.

If the domain is less than 12 months old, that's going to set you back. New domains generally are scrutinized more in sending. Not much you can do for that. It's one way they try to deter spammers who buy up domains for the sole purpose of spam.

Past that, have you tried sending the same message ( subject, content, etc ) from a gmail account to a test inbox that normally doesn't get your email? If it doesn't come in from the gmail email, you might have a subject line or content issue.

If you are sending from your own email setup, you might want to look into sending from an ESP or smtp solution like sendgrid and then send through them. That will normally help boost deliverability rather than using your own box setup.

Email can be a long and complex issue to tackle doing it on your own, but I would start with the above to try to tackle where the actual issue is

.
 

xmartel

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xmartel

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Could be several things.

If the domain is less than 12 months old, that's going to set you back. New domains generally are scrutinized more in sending. Not much you can do for that. It's one way they try to deter spammers who buy up domains for the sole purpose of spam.

Past that, have you tried sending the same message ( subject, content, etc ) from a gmail account to a test inbox that normally doesn't get your email? If it doesn't come in from the gmail email, you might have a subject line or content issue.

If you are sending from your own email setup, you might want to look into sending from an ESP or smtp solution like sendgrid and then send through them. That will normally help boost deliverability rather than using your own box setup.

Email can be a long and complex issue to tackle doing it on your own, but I would start with the above to try to tackle where the actual issue is

.


The .com and .ca domains are a couple years old. However the .net where the software is parked, and from which our emails come, was only registered in Aug 2019.

I haven't tried the gmail test idea. I'll give that a whirl.

We're going to look into sendgrid and do some testing there.


Thanks again everyone for the help.
 

eliquid

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The .com and .ca domains are a couple years old. However the .net where the software is parked, and from which our emails come, was only registered in Aug 2019.

I haven't tried the gmail test idea. I'll give that a whirl.

We're going to look into sendgrid and do some testing there.


Thanks again everyone for the help.

Ok, of note...

If your email comes from XYZcompany.net and you are inserting links back to you software/app which is XYZcompany.com, that could also throw some issues.

I have a similar setup like yours where we send from a .net version of our domain, but the software lives at .com and it threw up issues like this with some spam filters.

I only found out because our .net sending also has tracking links in .net too and it would throw up some email warnings with the .com version of our site ( within Thunderbird clients )
 

xmartel

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Ok, of note...

If your email comes from XYZcompany.net and you are inserting links back to you software/app which is XYZcompany.com, that could also throw some issues.

I have a similar setup like yours where we send from a .net version of our domain, but the software lives at .com and it threw up issues like this with some spam filters.

I only found out because our .net sending also has tracking links in .net too and it would throw up some email warnings with the .com version of our site ( within Thunderbird clients )

I don't believe the .net emails have any links to .com. They should all just point back to the software. But I'm going to double check to make sure. I could see this being an issue. Thank-you.
 
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OverByte

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I second/third the notion of using an email provider like sendgrid to do this (I personally use send grid), it's inexpensive for transactional emails (like the notifications for your use case), easy to set up and you'll get a bunch of features that would take a long time to build (like tracking/analytics, etc) + way better reliability. I don't see the benefit to rolling your own solution.

Also, @xmartel you didn't ask this part but I feel it's a red flag your developer didn't suggest this. Are they junior / little experience? I ask because a "not so great" developer can cost you a lot of money (even if they have a cheap rate), especially if they are the sole dev on your project.

To qualify that last part since I'm just some random dude on the internet - I've been in software industry for 10+ years, building everything from military software to iphone apps, worked with alot of developers....
 

xmartel

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We signed up for sendgrid and have noticed a marked improvement.

Turns out the developer did have a different program running that is similar to sendgrid, but it wasn't cutting it. I'm a little disappointed in them that they didn't dig into it a bit deeper and offer solutions. It is something they should know.

Besides being too slow in my opinion, they've been doing a pretty good job otherwise. I'm happy with what's getting built.

Appreciate the help.
 

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