Your success reaching your contacts depends on many factors. Here are the basic steps to achieving the best email deliverability, getting through internet providers' filters and staying out of people's 'junk' folders:

• When you send an email with CorpNote, your real email address is used as the 'from ' and 'reply to' email address. If you have a company email address that is in good standing then we recommend using it.
• If you are using a company email address, then there are several steps we recommend to improve your email deliverability, which your email administrator can help with: white list the CorpNote server, and add us to your SPF email record (a document located on your email server which tells other people that CorpNote is an approved sender). Details are below.
• If you are using free or mass email providers, like Outlook, AOL, Hotmail or Gmail, etc. and if you think this may be affecting your email deliverability, then you can easily change to another email address in your account at any time.
• CorpNote supports permission-based email, and it is your responsibility to only send email to people that have given you permission. People who know you are more likely to accept and open your message, and less likely to report your email as SPAM.
• If you use subject lines with 'spammy' phrases then you will most likely end up in people's junk folder. View our FAQ on writing strong subject lines
• One of the best ways to stay out of junk folders is to ask your contacts to add you to their email address book or contact list.

For Users Sending Email from a Company Domain Name

1. Email sent to yourself or to others in your company

When you send an email with CorpNote, your real email address is used as the 'from' and 'reply to' email address, even though they are sent from CorpNote's email server. While this is a legitimate practice for third-party email services like CorpNote, it's also a trick that's used by spammers called "spoofing". Your email administrator may have an email filter in place that blocks incoming emails that say they're from a company email address, but are sent from another email server.

The solution requires you to contact your email administrator and ask them to white list (allow) emails from the CorpNote email server. (view instructions)

2. Improving deliverability of email sent to others

One of the reasons email gets blocked by internet and email providers is that it fails a basic test — the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) lookup — which sends a request to the domain in the 'from' address of the email to look up the sending server and see if the sender is legitimate.

Since CorpNote uses your real email address as the 'from' and 'reply to' address, but the messages are sent from our email server, the SPF lookup will fail unless your SPF record lists CorpNote as an approved, trusted sender. The SPF record can be accessed and changed by your email administrator. Once they add our server name and IP address as an approved email sender, your chances of getting through SPAM filters are greatly increased.

The solution requires you to contact your email administrator and ask them to add us to the DNS record as an approved email sender. (view instructions)

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What to tell your email administrator:

Email messages sent through CorpNote are being rejected due to failing the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) lookup. The sending domain's SPF record does not include the sending IP address being used to relay the email. Please add the following server information to our domain's DNS to approve CorpNote as an email sender for our domain:

DNS Record Type: TXT
Host: @
Value: v=spf1 include:spf.corpnote.com ~all
TTL: 3600 seconds or 1 hour

Your domain may have other entries in its SPF record, in which you will only need to add include:spf.corpnote.com directly after v=spf1

If you previously added an SPF entry for CorpNote's mail server, you can safely remove ip4:34.232.204.112 from your record during this time, as the include statement will also contain this address.

For All Users

1. What you can do:

Use a current, clean permission-based email list and remove bounced email addresses promptly. Internet service providers (ISP's) monitor the number of bounced emails and emails reported as SPAM - all of which negatively affect your ability to reach the inbox.

It is also important that you provide content that is consistent with what your recipients are expecting. Here are some basic tips that will increase your chances of your message being opened and read:

• Be consistent with the branding in your messages so people will easily recognize your emails and not report them as SPAM
• Remove bounced email addresses from your email list. Not only does this help with ISP monitoring but it will also improve the quality of your email list and the accuracy of your open rate percentage.

2. What to ask your subscribers to do:

When people sign up for your email list, ask them to make you a 'Trusted Contact.' The easiest way to do this is for them to add you to their email address book or contact list.

Consider adding a sentence to your welcome email that says something like this: "To ensure you get our emails, add you@yourdomain.com to your address book and list of trusted senders."

NOTE: If you are using the CorpNote Subscribe Form, when someone enters their information, they are reminded to add you as a trusted sender.

Helpful Resources