E-mail delivery

An important element of our software is e-mail. This primarily concerns the e-mails sent by clients who use our Hosting functionality or formatted e-mails sent from the Communication Application. In addition, the automation processes of the system trigger automatic e-mails such as ‘forgot password’ e-mails, confirmations of forms and e-mails with event tickets and invoices. Yearly, our systems send out millions of e-mails. These e-mails are delivered to thousands of different e-mail providers. The best known providers are Microsoft (Office, Outlook and Hotmail) and Google (Gmail, G-Suite).

Fighting spam

Most e-mail providers monitor their platforms to prevent unwanted e-mail (SPAM) to be delivered to their users. They deploy many different resources to do this. For e-mail senders it is therefore necessary to follow the latest technological standards. As an e-mail sender, Genkgo wants to offer e-mails in a correct manner. To do this, we follow the guidelines below:

1. All sender domains (e.g. @yourdomain.nl) are verified before use.
2. Deployment of SPK and DKIM records.
3. Active and passive monitoring of sent e-mails and e-mail sender reputations.
4. Adapted sending method per provider containing feedback loops (by means of specialized software).
5. Correct technical construction of e-mail source, provided with active validation hyperlinks and images.
6. Subscription structure: users can register for and withdraw from subscriptions on (bulk) e-mail sent from the Communication Application. Recipients won’t receive unwanted e-mail because of this structure. This prevents them from deleting unopened e-mail or marking them as SPAM.

Sender reputation

By applying the guidelines above, Genkgo meets the requirements of the most important e-mail providers. This is a constant process. As a result of years of experience in maintaining and refining our guidelines, Genkgo actively contributes to fighting e-mail abuse (e.g. SPAM and phishing). As a result, our e-mail services are known to other e-mail providers as reliable and marked with an excellent ‘sender reputation’. A sender reputation is a specific score, actively kept by the most important e-mail providers. A good reputation causes all your e-mail to be delivered into your recipients inbox. A bad reputation increases the chance that sent e-mail will be marked as SPAM. This will have consequences for the delivery of e-mail to the inbox of the recipient. Besides the reputation of the e-mail service (Genkgo), your own reputation as sender (e-mail originating from your domain name) matters.

Your reputation as sender

In short, your reputation is good if you 1) don’t send SPAM messages, 2) don’t send messages with offensive content and 3) only send e-mails to recipients that want to receive your e-mails and for whom the content of your e-mails is relevant (for example persons who are subscribed to a subscription or members of the community).

No 100% guarantee

Unfortunately, a good sender reputation does not guarantee the delivery of your e-mails 100%. E-mails are sometimes rejected by e-mail providers. This can have multiple reasons, the main ones being:

• The e-mail address doesn’t exist (anymore). The e-mail address you used might have a spelling error;
• The beneficiary has personally marked a previous e-mail originating from your domain name as spam;
• The inbox of the beneficiary is full;
• Wrong SPAM software settings on the recipient’s side.

The rejection of an e-mail can be due to the content of the e-mail. Spam filters are not always 100% accurate and sometimes mark reliable e-mails as SPAM. It is even possible that all e-mail, regardless of the content, gets rejected.

In most cases, the e-mail provider of the receiving party gives the reason for the rejection of en e-mail (for example with a special bounce message). Unfortunately, there are still cases where the reason remains unknown because the e-mail provider doesn’t give any feedback. Not all providers give an appropriate error because they don’t want to reveal their methods for fighting SPAM. Sometimes, this makes it impossible to find the reason for the rejection of an e-mail.

“E-mail to person@domain.com doesn’t arrive”

You have tried to send an e-mail to the e-mail address of a profile in the Organization. This person tells you that they did not receive the e-mail. You can now take the following steps:

Check the delivery status of the e-mail. Follow the steps on our support page.

The e-mail was delivered

Ask the recipient to check their SPAM box. The e-mail might have been placed there.

The e-mail was not delivered

1. Check whether the e-mail address in the Organization is spelled correctly. An e-mail address cannot begin or end with spaces.
2. Check whether the e-mail address was added to the blacklist. If so, send an e-mail to support@genkgo.nl and include the e-mail address on the blacklist. Genkgo will then investigate the problem. The possible results are:
   • Reason is known; problem is solved
   • Reason is known; problem was not solved and an official complaint is submitted to the e-mail provider of the recipient
   • Reason is unknown; an official complaint is submitted to the e-mail provider of the recipient
   • Reason is unknown; no possibility to submit a complaint to the e-mail provider of the recipient

Submitted complaints

Even if there is a possibility to submit a complaint to the e-mail provider of the recipient, there is no guarantee that the complaint will be honored by the external party. If the complaint is honored, there is still no guarantee that your e-mail can be delivered to this recipient from that moment on.

When the e-mail address belongs to a specific organization, it may help to directly contact their technical department. This falls under your own responsibility.