Everybody hates spam and email providers work hard to filter unwanted messages before they reach users' in-boxes. There are things you can do to help make sure your emails do reach their intended recipients: only send to people who have asked to receive messages from you and keep your email list clean, by dealing with bounce-backs, unsubscribe requests and spam reports promptly.

When you use Pianola to send email, we always insert an unsubscribe link in every email and we remove from your records any email addresses that bounce, are invalid or report you for spam.

You can also make some changes to your own web domain's setting which will help improve deliverability.

When you send email from your own system, recipients' email providers can see that the email genuinely came from the domain it claims to have come from. However, when you send via Pianola, we are sending from our server on your behalf. This is perfectly legitimate but there is a way to absolutely verify to recipients' email providers that Pianola is authorised to send email on your behalf.

The instructions that follow relate to making changes to your domain's DNS records. These are the records that route your website's traffic and you inbound and outbound emails. Do not make changes unless you are absolutely sure what you are doing. If in doubt, please contact us for help.

The 'Sender Policy Framework' is a system designed to prevent email spoofing - where an email is sent that purports to be from a domain it is not. By adding an 'SPF Record' to your domain, you confirm who is authorised to send mail on your behalf. As only the registered owner of a domain could add a record, this gives proof that the email is not proofed.

To add Pianola to your domain's, create an SPF record and a TXT record with the following content:

v=spf1 a mx include:pianola.net ~all