Email: Ensuring Delivery from Your Own KAZOO Instance

This tip is to support clients are looking for more robust email delivery solution that include added flexibility to manage email SPAM and phishing, etc.

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NOTE: This documentation refers to the Monster UI implementation

Background

As email marketing and SPAM strategies become more and more sophisticated,  so has filters for spotting viruses, spam, and unwanted phishing.   These are  based on a variety of features, including:

  • DNS / Reverse DNS matching,
  • IP address reputation (% emails an IP sends that are marked as spam by the recipients vs. total volume),
  • Sender Policy Framework definitions (SPF), and
  • DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail).

Most people who receive email do so through a server that puts a score on the sender as to how adherent they are to the above policies.

2600Hz does not yet focus on trying to get our scores up.  The email we deliver may very well likely go to spam, especially on behalf of private cloud/global infrastructure clients. This is because managing these things is time consuming which makes them expensive and requires us to write additional software.

Adding a 3rd party service

When a client wants improved deliverability, we recommend they sign up for a third party service.

That third party service may do things like handle DNS, IP address reputation, SPF and DKIM (all listed above) for us while ALSO providing an accessible user interface to do things like trace email delivery, track bounces, handle unsubscribes, handle complaints, etc.

This feature is only possible on private cloud and global infrastructure because it impacts the ENTIRE server.  If a customer is on private cloud or global infrastructure they can sign up for a service (like SendGrid) that supports “SMTP Relay.”  Using SMTP relay means instead  of us sending emails directly to the recipient’s email server, we actually route them via  a service the customer selects.

Currently the most popular service we have supported is SendGrid.  We are researching others and will add more options below as we see them adopted.

How to request KAZOO recognize your 3rd party service 

Once a client has signed up for a service, they will need to request 2600Hz start relaying all email for their private cloud server to this service.  This is a “Private Cloud System Config Change”.

To make this request, please send the following information as part of a support ticket request;

  • SMTP Hostname
  • Authentication Username
  • Authentication Password
  • SMTP Port
  • Does provider support TLS/Encryption? (yes/no)
  • If yes, what is the TLS Port

The third party mail service will provide everything we need to configure this for them, and the expectation is that they provide such information, and we take care of it on our end.

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