The question is in the title.
As MXroute grows, and considering its focus on providing the best deliverability that it possibly can, the number of complaints about outbound emails landing in spam folders will grow. This is inevitable, and will likely become the most mentioned issue over time. I want to stress that an increase in these topics is an indication of growth and not an indication of decreased sending quality.
You see, avoiding having your email delivered to spam folders remains one of the most difficult tasks of all. To make matters worse, you can only speculate on the reason your email didn’t reach the inbox at most email providers. With that in mind, I want to lay out the layers of responsibility for clarity. There are three layers to deliverability in our view:
- IP reputation
- DNS settings
- Domain / content reputation
We consider ourselves responsible for #1 in almost every case. This means preventing spam, keeping us off of relevant RBLs (blacklists), retrying emails that fail delivery (from different IPs), and working with ISPs to ensure that we meet all reasonable/possible requirements to prevent them from blocking our IP space. This does not mean that we consider it our responsibility if a random recipient has specifically blocked you by blocking our IP, especially where the recipient isn’t someone that anyone else is sending email to (ex. your customer runs their own mail server and they blocked us to halt your emails). We might attempt negotiation in such a case, but that should help understand where we draw the lines in regards to IP reputation.
We consider #2 and #3 to be your responsibility. We enforce #2 to a degree (our policy requires a valid SPF record for senders), and we’re happy to advise to the best of our ability on #3.
Our hope is that you’ll use mail-tester.com and try to get a score of 10/10 to ensure the highest quality delivery that we can offer. If your email still lands in spam folders after that, the speculation about cause starts to get more theoretical. We can’t know, so we’ll propose:
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Domain reputation. Entirely possible that your domain is viewed poorly based on a keyword in the domain name, a history of recipients reporting email from your domain as spam, your domain being too young to have built up a positive reputation (we’ve heard relevant in some cases), or even just your domain’s connection to content that has been filtered by a spam filter a number of times and became “spam-like” by correlation.
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Content. If you’re struggling to hit inboxes, you might try reducing or removing HTML, images, etc. IP addresses, phone numbers, links, who knows. We’re just trying to offer advice on how to potentially offset the spam score, any of those things “could” play a role in dragging down the spam score.
Then there’s always a third case that people sometimes suspect, and frankly we can’t tell you that it isn’t true, there’s just nothing we can do about it if it is (because no one will admit to filtering this way, much less give us the chance to influence it):
- IP reputation + domain + content. It is entirely possible, even if not probable, that IP reputation is one piece of a spam score that is not enough to instantly filter an email to the spam folder, but that it could be a combination of your domain name and/or content with an unpublished bias against an IP address. This “might” explain why one customer consistently hits the spam folder but only when using our IP space, while another customer using our IP space never hits the spam folder.
The third one there is purely theoretical. We’re not saying it doesn’t happen, but we’re not saying it does either. We have no evidence to support the idea that it occurs, it’s just a wild technical theory. All we can do for IP reputation is keep our IPs clean, and that’s something we work our tails off to do.
It is not geared at all towards bulk email. So the answer to your question would be 0. MXRoute is solely for transactional / personal email.
My best recommendation for you is to find one of the 100’s of companies which specialize in setting up PowerMTA/Interspire servers.
We wouldn’t be a good fit for that large of a mailing list.
IMHO no. MXroute is best suited for transactional mail, not bulk emails. With the sending limit that MXRoute imposes you’d never be able to meet your volume requirements.
what’s the average list size mx is geared towards? someone mentioned gmail for setup; are the campaigns sent through gmail? i’m not fully clear how mx works.
How can we get 10/10 in mail-tester if we are encouraged not to setup DKIM records?
Hello
I am new here! I’m looking for a mass email solution for around 200,000 to 500,000 emails per month from my database for two companies that needs email campaigns. I’ve got no blacklisted domains, no excessive bounce or spam mail notifications in the past.
I’ve tried setting up Mautic… I’ve tried SES… I’ve tried various other services including Email API and all of it has been a total headache with months of loss of time for me. I am semi-technical but not advanced so I want to stay away from it as much as I can.
All I am looking for is a fairly basic email platform that doesn’t cost me hundreds $$ each month to send mass mails, where I don’t need to use SES and be under Amazon’s control (there’s a lot of complaints about Amazon putting too much restrictions lately), where I can focus my very limited work time to upload contacts, add images and design the emails, schedule the campaigns and send them off without wasting time on technicals and hurdles…no complicated and excessive ‘segments’, ‘strings’, actions’, triggers’ and what not just to send some emails off.
Is mxroute for me and will it allow the simplicity but necessary features to get this done at a low cost?
If anyone is patient and kind to perhaps help clarify this for me (and help either set it up or baby step-by-step instructions from beginning to end) in return I can give some simple tricks/guidance I discovered that works to minimize emails landing in spam. 
Could IP reputation be behind this bounce I received today? (My server is friday.mxroute). No mention of domain, and the content was ok (except I was ironically explaining to the recipient how emails end up in the spam folder).
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
…@comcast.net
Technical details of permanent failure:
554 resimta-po-29v.sys.comcast.net resimta-po-29v.sys.comcast.net 172.82.139.113 found on one or more DNSBLs, see http://postmaster.comcast.net/smtp-error-codes.php#BL000010
whois of the IP…
MXroute MXROUTE-IPV4-1 (NET-172-82-139-0-1) 172.82.139.0 - 172.82.139.255
That recommendation applies only to the cPanel servers really. And that is because most people cannot follow directions. You may also notice that it is not ‘encouraged’ in this topic.
With the deployment of all new customers on the DirectAdmin based system I’m now satisfied with the workflows that the minor gain is justifiable with the required workflow, but I’m still not convinced that it is worth this gain on average for cPanel users as the workflow is quite bad and the gain typically not enough to offset it.
It would be. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll add mitigation for this bounce error so that you won’t see it again. Please let me know if you do happen to run into it again.