Had a client just fire Mandrill. They got frustrated because two of their clients were failing to receive any email from their domain. We did SPF, DKIM, and domain verification. Still went into spam. Both of their clients looked at their security software and found 0 emails being blocked from the domain. All of the blocked email was from Mandrill’s domain (“hey, they are just spoofing the domain, it’s not them it’s really Mandrill”). They said they can’t whitelist Mandrill, that’s a spam factory. So now our client wants to send their own email directly from their domain.
I can’t believe it’s impossible for recipient firewalls to see that the mail is coming from the client’s actual domain instead of randomCrapMandrillapp.com. And I can’t believe even with doing all the trust-maximizing things, messages still get thrown into spam all the time. And, my understanding was that this and SendGrid were the industry standard, robust way to send emails, but these organizations are looking at it like a total hack.
I know there are two ways to use SendGrid (and probably Mandrill too). You can either let it tack on its own domain as the effective “from” address for security purposes, and not worry about doing SPF, DKIM, etc. for your own domain. That’s what I do and that’s probably what your client was doing. It’s the easiest approach, and I’d like to add that I’ve never encountered deliverability problems with it, after having used it for Todd, RLE Link and all room scheduling mail.
The other thing you can do is “whitelabeling”. That’s probably what @samrueby is doing. In that case, you set up your own domain with all of the security stuff and then you tell SendGrid or Mandrill not to stick their own domain into the messages. In that case, there should be no way for destination mail servers to know that SendGrid or Mandrill is involved, except maybe if they keep a list of IP addresses used by those companies and block everything coming from them.
Either way, this client’s experience does not sound typical.
If your recipients use Outlook, Hotmail (and other Microsoft webmail services), or Gmail, they may see an indication in the email that it was sent by Mandrill on your behalf instead of just your ‘from’ name and address. Add SPF and DKIM records to your sending domains to remove the ‘on behalf of’ or ‘via’ information.
