As some of you may be aware, we have experienced a fair amount of turbulence with our mail services lately. Having been let down by our previous sending provider, we have now switched to using the Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) to handle all of our outgoing mail.
With the every growing volume of unsolicited email (SPAM) being sent over the internet in recent years, service providers have been slowly increasing the aggressiveness of their sending policies in an attempt to curb the problem. For the most part, these tactics are working and SPAM emails now constitute just 63-64% of all email (a huge drop from a high of around 90% in 2010).
Once of the unpleasant, but ultimately unavoidable, side effects of our migration to Amazon SES is their incredibly strict ‘verified sender’ policy, which only allows emails to be forwarded on if the ‘from’ address of the email is verified in advance. As a result of this, we have unfortunately had to disable all email forwarding when the email has originated from an unknown source (one which we don’t manage).
This will dramatically improve the reputation of the server in the long-term and should improve deliverability rates across the board, but we understand that it represents an inconvenience for those of you who like to use 3rd party providers such as Yahoo or Gmail to manage your emails.
We will continue to explore alternatives and keep you updated as to any developments.
