I find a lot of our Estimate emails never reach client Inboxes.
We send through SMTP to our own mailserver which is setup correctly. We have good SPF, DKIM, and DMARC headers, and we pass all of the online tools such as MXToolbox. Other emails sent from our domain are delivered OK.
On researching the problem I identified several issues with how QuickFile is forwarding the mails to us.
QuickFile does not add a Message-ID header to the mail. We were initially sending our mails directly from QuickFile, but found mail services such as GMail were marking them as Spam and adding a SMTPIN_ADDED_MISSING header. To get around the issue we started sending through our own mail server and getting PostFix to add the missing header. (Note RFC 5322 details what headers should be added)
QuickFile encodes all parts of an email as base64 even when they do not contain anything that would require base64 such as special characters. This renders the text unreadable to a human and is considered âspammishâ behaviour by mail servers as an attempt at obfuscation. Better practice is to use âQuoted-Printableâ, which allows the use of non ASCII characters while leaving plain text un encoded. It also results in smaller emails, and lower load on mail servers.
QuickFile adds an image to emails that increase the image to text ratio, and results in a higher Spam score. The âPowered by QuickFileâ image added to every mail is 15.5kB. This is vastly more than the data consumed by the default text, and is regarded as âSpammishâ, as is the fact the image is hosted on the Quickfile server. To get around this issue I have modified our text and signature to pad it out and reduce the image to text ratio, but I can do nothing about the size of the image nor about the server it is hosted on. If QuickFile were simply to reduce the image size by compressing it more, that would be a help.
QuickFile adds an invisible âEmail Open Tracking Imageâ to every email. Trackers on emails is another âspammishâ indicator. I understand QuickFile wants to know a client has seen the estimate, and I value the green dot on the estimates list to show an estimate has been viewed, but I do not understand why the email has to have the tracking image, when it would be just as easy for the estimate web page to contain the tracker, and not have to worry about mail service providers either marking mails, as spam, or removing the tracker before presenting the mail to the client. (As my own email provider does)
I understand part of our problems with mail delivery is because as a young company we have not established a âreputationâ with mail providers, but I think QuickFile could make some fairly simply changes to make their mails less âspammishâ. At the moment every time we send out an estimate I have to send another mail the next day asking if the client received it.
Iâve been mentioning this since I started using QF in 2014. Would be good if they could make a less spammy looking email template but QF prefer to just say it works for them so the issue is my end and thatâs that. Itâs not as simple as that so I suspect they either donât understand email or arenât looking at it properly.
The community forum is not hosted by QuickFile, itâs a white label provider called Discourse who host forums as a service for many different organisations and software projects.
Message ID
It seems that the first email server to encounter the email should be generating a Message-ID if itâs missing, which is typically the SMTP server. In the case of emails sent through QuickFileâs default set up (Amazon Web Services, AWS), this is handled by them. This is the same as the forum emails. The Message-ID will end with .amazonses.com in this case.
If youâre using your own SMTP server, the SMTP server should be adding the missing header. I canât comment on your own SMTP server, but this is may be something to query with your SMTP Server provider to see why this isnât the case here.
Base64 Encoding
With the default set up, this is done automatically by AWS. For third party SMTP servers, I agree that quoted-printable would be a better approach, and have logged this with our development team to review.
Image to text ratio
That specific image is only applied to accounts that do not have a Power User Subscription. But as you have already discovered, templates can be altered to include more (or less) information as required.
As above, I will feedback to the development team regarding the file size of the image to see if we can improve this.
Open Tracking
We are in the process of updating the method used here. However, just to clarify that the green dot you reference isnât tied to the email itself, but is recorded when the user clicks the link to view the document and is independent of the email tracking.
The first server should generally add a Message-ID if itâs missing, but thereâs nothing to stop the originating client supplying their own Message-ID, which the server will then not touch - typical desktop mail clients like Thunderbird generate their own message IDs so the message copied to the sent folder (which hasnât gone through the SMTP server) has the same ID as the message in the recipientâs inbox (which has).
If you generate the ID header on your client side as something like <{random-uuid}@{business}.quickfile.co.uk> then thatâll work correctly in all cases, including when sending via third party SMTP servers that donât add their own Message-ID.
That is also my understanding. I have already configured my mail server to add all missing headers, so this issue on its own is not the cause of my erratic mail delivery.
So is this just an historical hangover that can just be removed, or does it have a function?
As I suspected. We will be taking out a Power Subscription soon.
It still very much has a function as it stands. We are changing from the pixel approach to a different approach. This is an active development, so as soon as we have further information, weâll be able to share this here.
The green dot will remain as this is independent of emails.
This has been updated and is now live, so this should hopefully help going forward.
QuickFile emails can appear spammy due to missing Message-ID headers, base64 encoding of plain text, large âPowered by QuickFileâ images, and email tracking pixels. Using your own SMTP helps with some issues, and templates can be adjusted to reduce image size and improve text-to-image ratio. QuickFileâs team is reviewing base64 handling and image size, and the green dot tracking is independent of the email itself.
