We care about email delivery and do everything possible to maintain our platform in both the technology and our reputation.

In the email universe there are 3 main parties:

1. The “ESP” (Email Service Provider). This could be considered 2 sub items:
   1. Sendgrid being our ESP,
   2. and RepairShopr being your ESP.
2. The “Sender.”
3. The Recipient (end customers and their chosen email provider).

The ESP has 2 main areas of responsibility.

1. Send email in a technically correct and responsible manner.
2. Create and enforce a minimum standard of delivery for all their customers.

As a sender, you have your own areas of responsibility.

1. Ensure that the email addresses you collect and mail actually belong to your customers.
2. Respect your customers and send them mail they want or expect.

Some things are out of everyone’s control.

1. Filters, particularly at the consumer ISPs, are based on machine learning and are very automated. They judge mail based on statistics and probability.
2. Consumers lose access to their email addresses over time. In fact, up to 30% of email addresses will go bad over a year. Mailing to these addresses can contribute to a poor reputation and bad deliverability.

What you can do

1. Verify you have the correct email addresses for customers. Ideally, you would send them an email while they’re in your store and have them confirm on their phone that they have received it. In RepairShopr, this can be done by making sure they confirm receipt of the ticket creation email/autoresponder at first interaction.
2. Since most of your email out of RepairShopr will be “transactional” (definitions below) you can make sure new clients add you to their address book, or interact with the emails.
3. If you are doing their IT and controlling your client’s email platform you could allowlist your domain on their relevant spam filter if one is implemented.
4. Ask your client to find all your email in their spam folder and “mark as not spam.”
5. Ask your client to add you to their address book.
6. Update your SPF record for your email server to allow RepairShopr to send emails on your behalf.
   

FAQ

Q: Why is my email going to the spam folder instead of my clients inbox?

A: Email providers run spam filters with black box technology with lots of machine learning built in. You can think of SEO as an analogy. They’ll look at sender IP, sending domain, sending email address, subjects, body, and more. They’ll also try to categorize the email and then make a guess at if they think the recipient wants to interact with this piece of mail based on their prior behaviors.

If you are sending an invoice to someone that never opens emailed invoices, there is a good chance the filter will make up it’s mind that this person doesn’t want that email, no matter how good the email or sender reputation is.

Also imagine you have a ticket opened for a contact at your large client, and they decide to click the spam button accidentally as they clean up their inbox. Happens all the time. Now this may have just moved all your email to this client to the spam folder. This can actually put all your email to all your clients in the spam folder for all we know.

Q: OK, so why does the email I send directly go to their inbox but not when I send from RepairShopr?

A: There are lots of potential reasons, we can only guess due to the nature of the black box machine learning/AI spam filters in operation at most mailbox providers. Some guesses could be;

• This person recently got a number of emails from you and didn’t interact with them.
• Someone recently clicked the spam button on similar email from you.
• This person recently clicked the spam button on very similar email from someone else.
• Many other potential reputation issues around the sending email, headers, etc.

Definitions

Marketing Email: Any email sent that primarily contains a commercial message or content intended for a commercial purpose (i.e. nurturing leads through your funnel) is considered a marketing email and must follow local laws. Marketing email is generally sent to groups of contacts that are prospects or customers.

Transactional Email: One-to-one emails that contain information that completes a transaction or process the recipient has started with you. A common example is in e-commerce, after purchasing an item you receive a email receipt that has information about the item, price, and shipment. Transactional email is sent to individuals rather than a large list of recipients.