We've made some exciting changes that give you more control of your email reputation to enhance deliverability. Because of the increasingly crafty tactics of spam and phishing campaigns, it's harder than ever to set up everything just right to make sure that email service providers (like Google, Yahoo, and Comcast) believe you are who you say you are and actually pass along your messages to their customers.
All email sent through NationBuilder is now sent using an authenticated domain. Your custom domain is automatically authenticated if NationBuilder is managing the domain. The upgrade means that domains managed elsewhere can add authentication records, and we'll send email for customers using free emailnb addresses via a pool of authenticated domains. This upgrade occurred when we redesigned the entire process for attaching a domain to a nation in Settings > Domains.
In February, Google announced that it would put a broken lock icon on emails that came from providers who didn't properly encrypt messages in transit. Google also declared that it would place a question mark icon on the avatar of a sender who sends unauthenticated email to their users. Emails are authenticated when DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records have been added to the domain's settings, indicating that the domain owner has authorized a particular email host to send on behalf of that domain. Having DKIM and SPF in place prevent other people from spoofing, which means that they pretend to be you in order to get people to open malicious email.
To further guard against spoofed emails, Yahoo reported in late February that it would expand its usage of the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) system to all international Yahoo Mail domains. DMARC allows for a domain owner to specify rules for what to do with unauthenticated email sent from the domain. Yahoo joined Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Paypal as providers who have adopted a "reject" policy for DMARC, meaning that all unauthenticated email is blocked without prejudice.
NationBuilder has always automatically configured DKIM/SPF for domains we manage, and we have at least 99% TLS encryption across all of our sender domains according to Google. As of March 7, 2016 we can ensure that all email sent from NationBuilder is authenticated, giving you the best chance of reaching your intended recipients. When you attach a domain managed elsewhere to your nation, the records you need to add to your DNS are available in the Settings section of your control panel. You will need to attach the domain to your nation to authenticate your email, though you do not have to connect the domain to a website. Even if you fail to complete authentication for your domain, we'll send your blast via one of our pre-authenticated generic domains.
Just like with professional relationships, email providers assign your domain reputation over time as you send consistently authenticated emails with which their users actually engage. We can't absolutely guarantee that your messages are going to get delivered to every recipient (there's a lot of different rate limiters and spam filters out there that aren't totally transparent). But we are working hard to make sure that emails you send with NationBuilder will reach your people.
