Email is now the backbone of any business communication. Be it internal corporate emails, transactional emails, marketing or sales emails, without a solid email infrastructure, your emails may not land where they were originally intended – in your target recipient’s mailbox.
If you’re thinking of setting up your own email infrastructure: you’re probably at the stage of wondering what it takes to have a strong foundation. A solid email infrastructure can enable better email deliverability and presentation of your email, thereby enhancing your brand’s profile and image.
Email Infrastructure: In Simple Terms
Email infrastructure is a combination of the software and hardware components that come into play when a user writes an email and hits the send button. Email infrastructure consists of the following elements: mail agents, mail servers, email authentication protocols, IP addresses, sending domains, feedback loops.
Email infrastructure has a lot to do with the technical aspects of a company’s main corporate email set-up and end to end emailing process and in some cases even their email marketing set-up and cycles.
One must typically think of their email infrastructure as the wheels of their company’s car in a digital-first world.
A Few Fundamentals to keep in mind when setting up your Email Infrastructure
A poorly set up email infrastructure can create havoc for a company’s sender reputation and lead to a lot of unnecessary issues when it comes to transmitting important transactional messages or marketing and sales emails.
At the basis of it; there are two types of email infrastructure – managed and self-managed. Managed email infrastructure is handled by third-party providers while self-managed involves models where a business internalizes everything from email analytics, maintenance, the hardware, software and all the in-between.
To take a step back and understand what you need to take care of when setting up your email infrastructure; have a quick look at the pointers below:
Get Your IP Right!
Seasoned martech users or marketers already know the importance of having a strong IP address to boost email ROI and deliverability while using it to protect their brand’s domain. Knowing whether a shared IP or dedicated IP is right for your use case is crucial at the base of it all.
The choice between the two should depend on your business goals in terms of email sends (quantity), frequency, budgets and so on. Like the names suggest, a shared IP is used by several senders while a dedicated IP only belongs to you and your brand.
A shared IP might work if you are at a very nascent stage of your business and won’t be sending high volume emails. However, a dedicated IP is much better for brands at a slightly more mature stage especially if they have several outbound, internal and transactional emails to deal with.
An important criterion to remember when setting up a new IP: it is fundamental to warm up any new IP, without doing so, you could end up blacklisting your email domain. This should be done by sending few emails initially and steadily increasing the quantity over a period of time. Email reputation tools can help with this part of the process.
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Know What Mail Agents Do
Mail agents, to put it simply, take care of sending and delivering an email. There are usually four types of mail agents commonly used to send emails: Mail User Agent (MUA), Mail Submission Agent (MSA), Mail Transfer Agent (MTA), and Message Delivery Agent (MDA).
MUA, or email client, is a desktop or web application (Gmail, Outlook) that users use to send and receive emails.
MSA is the thread between the mail user agent (MUA) and the mail transfer agent (MTA). It receives the message, checks errors, then transmits it to the MTA.
Thereafter, MTA transmits email messages to another computer or another MTA. This is where the email queuing process takes place.
MDA converts received email messages into the appropriate media format and then transmits them to the recipient’s mailbox or MUA.
Keep in Mind that Mail Servers Are the Heart of Email
No matter how smart you are, you just can’t send an email without email servers! The only outgoing server that exists is called SMTP server, and the two types of inbound servers are: IMAP and POP3.
Boost your Sending Domains
Remember when we spoke about email domains being affected with poor unhealthy IPs in point 1 above? Your sending domain is the domain that tells mail servers who is sending the emails. To break it down: it is that part of your email address that comes after ‘’at’’.
Akin to IPs, sending domains too can be shared or dedicated. Shared domains are those associated with free email services (Google/Yahoo) while dedicated domains are those that a business would typically set up for their communication needs.
Like IPs, sending domains too need to be warmed up over a period of time to ensure longevity of the domain and health of the email cycle: from its send to final delivery.
Always Follow Email Authentication Protocols
In today’s digital world, no one is safe from the various types of phishing, spoofing and other cyber and online scams out there. This is where understanding and implementing strong email authentication protocols can protect your business and brand. Email authentication protocols when adhered to also help ensure your emails don’t get forged.
Most email servers use these common protocols: SPF / DKIM / DMARC / BIMI.
While setting up your email infrastructure, keep in mind that just one protocol might not be good enough, implementing a combination might be a better way forward keeping in tune with the sophistication of online scams today.
Another Important Element: Email Feedback Loop
Feedback loop enables businesses to receive information on spam and complaints from the email service providers. Businesses use this information to clean their data, remove uninterested participants from their email send list and maintain email data hygiene Without focusing on this step, businesses can face deliverability issues in the future. Most organizations today are obliged to clean their data and use feedback loops to ensure they protect their sender reputation by not emailing users that don’t want to hear from them.
To implement a strong feedback loop, businesses must have a dedicated email address to which users can send spam related or other complaints.
Email infrastructure as a service is offered by a host of SaaS providers today. These SaaS tools act as end-to-end solutions, in many cases providing a combination of all of the above. But knowing what forms the basis of a strong email infrastructure will help you decipher what type of tool, tech and process you need to deploy together to power your business’ email lifecycle.
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