For the second year running, as part of our "stay sane" strategy for FFConf, Julie and I write and send a weekly newsletter. It's structured the same way so it means we have a much better line of sight as to what we have to say.
The open rate is usually around 40% (though I know some email systems synthetically do this), but our click rates are also usually pretty good.
This week however, open rate was 3% and click rate was just 8 clicks. Something was definitely…afoot.
Spam scores
I had a report from a friend of the event that last week's newsletter landed in their spam folder. From this, I decided to integrate spamassassin to try to score the content (which it almost always comes back clean).
As belt and braces, I also paid for some credit for Mail Tester which gives me an email address that I can send to and it'll run all manner of tests, including stuff outside of the actual markup.
I had a score of 9.8/10 - so I dipped into what could be improved, and suggested "check DMARC policy state".
DMARC
The page suggested:
Not being that versed in email security set up, and like many of us, having to wear many hats, I just copied what I needed and trotted along adding this record.
What I didn't appreciate was that this change translates to:
If the email didn't come from Left Logic, just reject it.
The problem being is that the email doesn't come from Left Logic, it comes from AWS because I use SES for sending the newsletters. So even though our newsletter product said they were all sent. AWS also said they were all sent. Only a handful of people had the email.
The only reason I figured it out was because I hadn't received the email to my personal email.
The temporary fix was to add this to the _dmarc.leftlogic.com as a TXT:
"v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@leftlogic.com"
I do need to sort out proper SPF records and DKIM and "Easy DMARC" (whatever that is), but next time around I might be a little more careful with what I copy and paste…
(though, who am I kidding!)