Email Deliverability¶

To improve your deliverability, TouchPoint automatically authenticates your email messages with DKIM and SPF. Authentication is a sender identification tool that protects mass email senders and their recipients from spam, forgery, and phishing. Since our authentication is enabled by default, you don’t have to edit any advanced settings like DNS records.

The Sender header is used to identify in the message who submitted it. This is usually the same as the From header, which is who the message is from. However, it can differ in some cases where a mail agent is sending messages on behalf of someone else, which is what we do.

In an email message, the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) envelope, with information like sender, recipients, etc., has the Sender as mailer@tpsdb.com and From as the person who is sending the email (the user’s email address, not necessarily your church’s email). This approach works the same way MailChimp works when it sends newsletters out for its clients and most ISPs like gmail work very nicely with this approach.

For two recipient domains, aol.com and yahoo.com, there are problems with having a Sender different than the From. For those domains, we create the SMTP envelope with only a From address and then a ReplyTo address. The From is mailer@tpsdb.com and the ReplyTo is the email address of the user in your database which could be any email address, not just your church. This approach works well for these two domains and still lets the recipient clearly see who is sending the email (your user, not bvcms).

When an email bounces with a hard bounce or is marked as Spam by the recipient, SendGrid discontinues sending to that email address until we remove the block as requested by our client. This is the key to preserving our reputation as a mass emailer. The effect of this can be that some recipients may no longer receive emails the church sends them. We can easily remove the block when the client requests. We provide all the reports and tools the church needs to manage this including failed email reports, open tracking and opt-outs.