Whether you use 3rd parties as inbox providers, bulk emailers, CRMs, marketing automation, order management, support ticketing, calendaring or any other task, they are more than likely an integral part of your day-to-day business. But, are you managing their reputation? Is their email reputation harming yours?
Your email reputation is highly dependent on who is sending email on your behalf so it needs to be managed. Think about it – if a 3rd party emails one of your customers and they are blacklisted or mis-configured then how does that reflect on you? Not only is there a risk that the email might not make it to your intended recipient, it might get lodged in their junk email. Regardless, your reputation, and email delivery, is tied up with that of your 3rd party providers.
So, how do you manage the reputation of a 3rd party?
The minimum step to managing 3rd party reputation is to setup Blacklist Monitoring of all the outbound IP addresses they use for your email. With monitoring, when your email providers get blacklisted, you get alerted to the issue. Under normal operations, there is a general risk of blacklisting, especially for bulk email providers. However, the more frequently a provider is blacklisted and the larger the proportion of their network is blacklisted, the bigger the risk for your business.
The best method for managing 3rd party emailers involves adopting DMARC, DKIM and SPF technologies. These technologies allow you to take control over who is sending on behalf of your domain and receive feedback on how emails sent by you and your 3rd parties are being received and handled. DMARC, DKIM and SPF have become business requirements for anyone sending email at more than small volumes.
Using DMARC to manage 3rd parties
When you begin receiving DMARC digests, you will have feedback on how all email purporting to come from your domain is passing SPF, DKIM and DMARC tests at recipient email boxes. You can look up the IP addresses and domains of your email providers in these reports to determine if they are passing. Any legitimate senders not passing SPF will need to be added to your SPF records. Any legitimate senders not passing DKIM will need to be contacted so that DKIM can properly be configured for those providers. You may potentially need to examine whether or not you want to continue your relationship with some providers if they cannot improve performance.
MxToolbox helps you manage your email providers
MxToolbox Delivery Center is the best way to manage 3rd party email providers. Rather than forcing you to deal with raw XML digests, MxToolbox Delivery consolidates and report on all the IP addresses and domains sending on your behalf across all inbox providers. You get clear reports, filtered by date, provider, IP address, SPF record and more of who is passing and failing SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment, authentication, and compliance.
With Delivery Center, you get something no other company provides – blacklist information on your providers. We monitor the reputation of the senders in your SPF record and alert you when one of those senders is blacklisted. You also receive full analysis of your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records for RFC compliance and best practice recommendations for configurations. Learn more about MxToolbox Delivery Center.