We have recently experienced a surge in system email not reaching the recipient. It’s a huge problem for all users. We really don’t know why, but it comes down to the recipient email providers tightening spam filters. The email ecosystem is complex and always changing. All POBITS email is sent through a commercial Simple Mail Transport (SMTP) provider who was chosen for its solid reputation as a non-spamming service that is white-listed throughout the land. But it’s not that simple. Spam filters look for all kinds of attributes to flag a message as spam. In POBITS, all messages claim to be from the domain pobits.com but are actually sent through the commercial service’s domain. So this looks spammish right off.
To counter this, we have settings in our domain profile to verify that that SMTP domain is associated with the pobits.com. Still not good enough. Since the email providers are being more critical, we have to do more to make our mail more approvable.
Today we made one change that should improve conditions. Previously, all system mail came from no-reply@pobits.com and we’ve changed it to support@pobits.com – a legitimate mailbox. Our mail administrator informs us this is a big red flag and will hopefully make a difference. This is in effect now. One benefit from this is that bounced mail comes to us and we can forward it back to the sender. You may ask, why not just use the sender’s address? We started out that way and had significant delivery issues due to the mismatch between the sender’s domain and the actual SMTP domain. However, we are discussing reverting to that option because our email provider has explained how to do it with a better outcome. This would be superior because the sender would receive any bounced messages.
In the near future, our development tool will support the option to apply your organization’s SMTP server. So whatever SMTP server you use, we configure your account to use it. That makes your mail picture perfect and we would anticipate 100% email delivery.
Bottom line, we are well aware of the issue and we take responsibility to improve it.