Email services have always been an integral part of SiteGround’s hosting offerings and our customers rely on them a lot. We process hundreds of thousands of emails every day. And many of them are sent as forwarders set up on our servers by our customers. Ensuring the proper delivery of these forwarded emails can be more challenging than you might think, because sender verification is not as easy as it is for direct emails.
With the introduction of our spam protection system , we now have more options to improve the handling of our outgoing email traffic. This has allowed us to become one of the few hosting companies to implement the SRS (Sender Rewrite Scheme) and thus significantly improve the delivery rates of forwarded emails for our customers. Here are the details of how this new feature works and what benefits it brings to our users.
Why are forward emails harder to deliver?
Usually, when there is an incoming email, the receiving server tries to check whether the sending server is legitimate and whether the email should be accepted. The purpose of this check is to Albania Email Database prevent malicious senders from reaching your inbox (for example, a fraudulent email pretending to be from your bank’s domain name). Domain names use for legitimate email sending must have a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record that defines the IP addresses or hosts that are allow (or not allowed) to send messages on behalf of that domain.
In the context of email forwarding, we have a sender, who is sending an email to a destination address, and then this destination address forwards the message to its final recipient. This means that the final recipient is receiving an email from an “intermediary” server, and this server, based on its SPF record, may not be authorized to send messages on behalf of the initial sending domain. Depending on the receiving server’s policies, failed SPF (Sender Policy Framework) authentication may result in the email being bounc or ending up in the Spam folder.
How does SRS make email forwarding more reliable?
The SRS mechanism provides a forwarding solution that avoids SPF errors. It ensures that forward emails that are legitimate can be accept successfully by the receiving mail server. SRS Buy Email Database List rewrites some of the metadata in emails after they pass through the intermediary server, “instructing” the receiving mail server to check the SPF record for the relay server, not the original sender’s domain. This way, the SPF check would pass because the relay server’s IP address would match the sender’s address.
Here’s a real-world example of how it works:
Imagine that your bank, for example, sends an email to your business email address. Which is host on SiteGround. The email comes from your bank’s IP and its from email address. Since these two values match and the SPF check passes successfully, Now, imagine you want to forward this email from your business to your personal.
If the SRS is configur correctly. The “from” address Bulk Database will be change to match the SiteGround IP as its host. Since these values match and are associate. The SPF check will pass successfully and you will receive the email from your bank in your personal inbox as well. This makes SRS an important part of every mail server configuration to maintain the efficiency and reliability of email forwarding services, ensuring that important communications are not mistakenly mark as spam or reject due to SPF checks.
SRS Implementation Results
We are already seeing a very positive impact on the deliverability of forward emails after SRS was implement on our servers. Our data shows 0% SPF errors for all emails forward from our servers, demonstrating incredible stability and reliability of our mail service and improving the reputation of our email system addresses. Needless to say, this also directly benefits the email reputation of domains host on our servers.