Note:  This page is a draft, for private discussion only.  Much of what is presented here is not yet implemented.

 

What To Do About Rejected Email

If your email has been rejected by a receiver using the Registry of Public Email Senders, you have three options, explained below.  Option 1, registering your Identity and earning a good reputation for that Identity, gives you the best assurance of having your mail accepted anywhere in the world.

 

  

26-Sept-2005

The Registry is supported by subscriptions from receivers, and is operated for the benefit of receivers.  When a receiver wants to check the Identity and reputation of an unknown sender, it queries the Registry and gets all the information needed in one packet.  This could include ratings from each of several Rating Services, and whatever data is needed to run an authentication method specified by the owner of the Identity.  Senders are rated by how well they contol abuse of their Identities.  A good rating will allow a sender to bypass spam filtering, and avoid most of the false rejects.

1a) Fix Your HELO Name

You must provide a standards-compliant HELO name at the start of every email session.  Your HELO name must be a fully-qualified domain name (no abbreviations), and it must include your registered domain name at the end.  Examples:

EHLO my.favorite.mail.server

EHLO mailout17.dallas.texas.example.com

The first one will fail, because mail.server is not a valid domain name.  The last one is OK, provided example.com has information readily available through an ICANN-authorized domain-name registrar.

1b) Register Your Identity

Register your domain name as a Public Email Sender's Identity.  After signing up, you can use our web interface to choose your authentication methods, change your authorized servers, add rating services to your record, or set up the record to be periodically copied from a file in your domain.

As the owner of a Public Email Sender's Identity, you are in complete control of your Registry record, all except the ratings, of course.  If you set up your record properly, forgery of your Identity will be easily stopped by any receiver that cares enough to check.  You can even prevent the use of names that look deceptively similar to yours.

2) Use a Forwarder with a Good Reputation

If you have no reputable Identity, or you can't control your outgoing spam, you may want to send your legitimate mail through a forwarder.  Many companies do this just to save money.  Proper operation of a Public Mail Server is more difficult than many realize.  See our list of A-rated forwarders for suggestions.

3) Temporary Pass

You can get a temporary pass that will allow you to send messages for a short time.  Acceptance of these messages is entirely at the discretion of the receiver.  Most will apply rate limits and delays to avoid abuse of this option by spammers.