SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. It’s an email authentication method that helps identify the mail servers that are permitted to send email from a particular domain. Using this validation protocol, ISPs can determine when spoofers and phishers are trying to forge emails from your domain to send malicious email to your users.

Unfortunately, this is a huge problem plaguing consumer inboxes with repeated and unending attempts to illegally obtain personally identifiable information. Transactional email is particularly susceptible to attacks since spammers rely on existing relationships to drive your user to take action such as confirming an account, resetting a password, or logging in to correct a problem. Since SMTP alone won’t help, you must authenticate your mail using all the tools available to you to prevent these email attacks. This includes SPF.

How SPF Works

SPF is an open standard that protects the envelope sender. The envelope sender uses path registration (a.k.a. return path) and validates by mapping the IP address to the registered domain name in the MAIL FROM Return and/or the HELO/EHLO SMTP command. You must register an SPF record (or TXT record) using the v=spf1 parameter in the DNS that contains your IP addresses for each mail server authorized to send your messages. ISPs then use the DNS to verify the source and make filtering decisions. If the DNS record passes, then your email can be delivered. (This isn’t to say however that it absolutely will be delivered. As you know, there are many factors that can contribute to delivery failure. In this case if the email isn’t delivered, it won’t be because of SPF failure. To learn more about best sending practices, download our free Deliverability Guide.)

Not everyone uses SPF authentication, but receivers that reject based on SPF failure will reject delivery. Some receivers may also quarantine mail that fails SPF without blocking it.

Since this can be confusing stuff, we recommend checking out OpenSPF.org that provides a great example policy to show how SPF works.

Each SPF record will be a bit different, but you should check to make sure you’ve got it right. Here are three tools that can help validate your records.

• Scott Kitterman’s SPF Testing Tools: Check to see if an SPF record already exists for your domain, check its validity or test its performance.
• OpenSPF.org: Review a series of form and email based testers.
• Google SPF Check: This service is only for Google Message Security customers, and has to be enabled, but it provides two resources for checking SPF by both sender and recipient domain.

The Sum of It All

Simply put, malicious email hurts your business and degrades the email channel. While SPF won’t prevent spam, it can serve as a deterrent and make you less vulnerable to attacks. Combined with Sender ID and DKIM, SPF provides an extra level of protection that will better support your users by helping ISPs properly identify your email and in turn, the spammers.

To learn more about SPF and other authentication protocols, download the SendGrid Email Infrastructure Guide.

I’m fascinated by statistics and analytics so when I stumbled upon Techstars Cloud graduate company TempoDB recently I had to check them out.

What is TempoDB?

TempoDB is a database designed specifically for storing time series data. This data could be anything really but it’s better used for little pieces of information like thermostat temperatures, network latency or heart rates. Perfect for storing data over extended periods of time, or where the storage requirement is very, very frequent.

There is so much potential here, particularly for the new generation of ‘Internet of Things’ connected devices that will be emerging over the next 10 years; a supposed 50 billion.

How it relates to SendGrid

Hmm, which part of our system can give you data over periods of time? If you don’t know, you haven’t dug deep enough into our awesome docs.

The Event API can spit out a tonne of data to wherever you tell it. We show it to you on your Statistics Dashboard, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t also store the same data elsewhere for further, different, or customised analysis. TempoDB is perfect for this.

Digging the ‘Event Tunnel’

To test it out, I wrote a small server using Node.js that would tunnel data from the SendGrid Event API through to a TempoDB database as the events come through in real time. The full code is below, but here are the steps it takes:

• Includes Node.js HTTP and QueryString libraries (Lines 1-2)
• Includes the TempoDB Node.js library (Line 3)
• Grabs whatever the Event API sends us and write it out to a time series on our TempoDB (Line 11-27)
• Listens to HTTP server listens for POST requests. If it gets one it hands the data off to be stored on TempoDB. If the request is not POST then we just kill it, 405 style. (Lines 30-55)

The full code, hosted on Github:

That’s all it takes to pipe your SendGrid events, like clicks, opens or unsubscribes, into TempoDB.

Try it out

If you just want to keep a count of the events coming out of your account in a store then you could deploy this code right now, either to Heroku or Nodejitsu or directly to your own server. You might want to tweak it a little once you’ve seen it in action to better suit your specific need.

Once you have the server running somewhere publicly accessible, you’ll need to enable the Event Notification app and change the ‘POST Event URL’ setting to the new URL for the TempoDB tunnel… and that’s it – watch the data flow!

Then what?

That’s really up to you. I would suggest just leaving it initially to build up a decent picture of data you’ll need a few days. After that it’s well worth exploring some of the visualisation options TempoDB offer in their dashboard to give you an idea of what can be done.

In part two of this look at TempoDB, I’ll show you how to extract and analyse some of the data into a beautiful (maybe) daily digest email. In the meantime, why not take a look at your own SendGrid stats? If you’re not already digging in, you’re really missing out.

1. What is their expertise in email deliverability? Find out if they have a dedicated team that specializes in email delivery and what services they provide. For example, authentication, dedicated IPs, feedback loops, ISP monitoring and outreach can be critical when delivery challenges occur.
2. What type of access do you have to their deliverability experts? Deliverability failures can happen any time of day or night. You’ll need 24/7 responsive support.
3. How supportive is their infrastructure to growth? If you plan to grow your user base over time, make sure your provider can accommodate varied email volumes. This is critical for any business that relies on email to drive their business.
4. Can they deploy email? If you want an all-in-one solution, make sure they have the right capabilities to send mail. Some providers do one or the other, which might require you to employ additional resources to manage operations. Also ask about their transactional vs. marketing email capabilities.
5. Can you customize your email experience? Sending email involves best practices around branding, personalization, and content. Make sure you can tailor email templates and perform regular tests to optimize your campaign for maximum delivery and response.
6. What metrics do they provide? Providers that can deliver both delivery and response metrics can give you the whole picture in one platform. You’ll need access to this data for each deployment.
7. How long does it take to integrate? Understand the process as it relates to your organization. Ask for documentation and talk to clients to get a full and accurate understanding of the integration process.
8. Can you customize the platform to suit your business needs? The ability to expand usability is key. Again, look at their documentation and pay specific attention to their APIs to determine capabilities for now and in the future.
9. Can they whitelabel their platform? If you send email on behalf of other customers, it is important for your provider to enable subusers. Ask what type of access they provide and how you can manage their activity and privileges.
10. How much do they cost? No matter the size of your organization, managing your email delivery no longer has to be an expensive proposition. Find a solution that can help you increase your effectiveness without breaking the bank.

Be sure to keep these questions in mind when looking for your next email solution. To see how SendGrid fulfills all of the points above, download our free guide: The SendGrid Buyer’s Guide: What You Need to Know Before You Buy.

Pantheon’s all-in-one Drupal platform cuts the ties that bind developers to physical servers and provides everything they need to build, launch, and run solid websites.

Based on a modern Web scale infrastructure, Pantheon’s solutions deliver on the promise of “smooth scaling in software,” with no architectural changes, eliminating the hidden risks and costs of traditional hosting models. Drupal, the world’s fastest growing CMS, powers more than 1.5 million websites globally.

SendGrid and Pantheon share the goal of making it easier for developers to spend their time building the next great application or website instead of managing their infrastructure.

With over 20,000 Drupal websites launched on Pantheon, Pantheon handles the hardware, operating system, development tools, workflow, and scaling, freeing developers to focus on content strategy, design, mobile and social media experience to build an amazing website.

By teaming up with Pantheon, SendGrid can now help an expanding community of Drupal developers scale their email infrastructure and make sure their transactional messages reach the inbox.

If you are a Pantheon developer, follow these three simple steps to send email using SendGrid’s email service:

1. Create a SendGrid Account

You can send up to 200 emails per day for free with SendGrid, so it’s risk free to try out. Also, as a Pantheon customer, we are also able to offer you a discount on higher-volume plans. Sign up for an account to get started.

2. Download Drupal’s SMTP Module

Pantheon recommends using the actively maintained SMTP module to send email with Drupal, regardless of your email gateway. Luckily, SendGrid plugs right in.

Download the latest recommended release and install it in the code/sites/all/modules directory. You can push it with git, use the SFTP account in your Pantheon dashboard, or even use drush dl, the same as you would with any other module.

3. Add Your SendGrid Account Details

Login to your Drupal dev site with your Pantheon username and password, which gives you administrator access. Along the menu at the top of the screen, click on Modules, where you’ll see SMTP Authentication Support in the Mail section. Click “Configure” and you will see the SMTP settings page.

Over 75 veterans participated in the previous iteration of the boot camp last year. TechStars mentors, alumni and technology leaders will help participants hone their business idea, investment pitch and accelerator applications. The curriculum includes presentations from experts and one-on-one mentoring that culminates in each attendee giving a short presentation about their startup.

Patriot Boot Camp will take place July 17-19 in Washington, DC.

SendGrid was part of the 2009 TechStars class and is proud to be a sponsor of Patriot Bootcamp. Veterans or spouses can apply for boot camp. For inspiration, be sure to watch some of the 42 presentations from the 2012 Patriot Bootcamp. Apply now!

We had a full day of engaging sessions, real-time demos, and great conversations with our attendees and were also very lucky to have an all-star line-up of presenters from HubSpot, Keen IO, and SendGrid Labs.

Our first guest presenter was our good friend from HubSpot, Tom Monaghan, who delivered an enlightening (and witty) presentation entitled, “How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Email.” That’s certainly a sentiment we can agree with—thanks Tom!

To kick off our developer track, we heard from Ryan Spraetz and Daniel Kador of Keen IO—a SendGrid Cloud Platform Partner and a fellow TechStars graduate. SendGrid and Keen IO share the vision of making integrations easier for developers with powerful APIs that build email delivery and alerts into their applications. A big “thank you” to Ryan and Daniel for bringing these integration details to life in their talk.

Following Keen IO, we heard from SendGrid Developer Evangelist Swift who gave us a comprehensive look at SendGrid’s APIs. Swift has been hard at work out on the road lately showcasing his popular Arduino workshop. Check it out and see where you can find him presenting on the road next in our Event Calendar.

Our final guest speaker was our very own Mike Rowan. Mike is the VP of Research and Development at SendGrid and spearheads SendGrid’s internal effort, SendGrid Labs. Mike likes to say that his job is “to make developers’ lives more awesome” so it was great to see him in action. Right now, Mike is focused on loader.io—a free load testing application that allows you to stress test your web apps and APIs with thousands of concurrent connections. It’s a really exciting tool that is picking up a lot of traction. To learn more, follow Mike and loader.io on Twitter.

In addition to our guest speakers, our schedule included compelling presentations about global email trends, how to stay in the good graces of the ISPs, how to successfully add marketing messaging into your transactional email, and how new and existing customers can get the most out of their SendGrid accounts.

It was a full day with some great interaction from our attendees. But, it doesn’t stop there…we’re extending our SendGrid Delivered tour and venturing across the pond this June to present in London, Berlin, and Paris.

Like all of our SendGrid Delivered stops, SendGrid Delivered International is free. So sign up now to secure your spot! And be sure to stay tuned for more details on our European leg and for announcements regarding our fall tour on Twitter with #SendGridDelivered.

What better company to showcase such a mashup than Iron.io? Their message queue and worker APIs allow 3rd parties to create asynchronous and scalable architectures. Also, just like SendGrid they have webhooks that allow for an event driven workflow.

Introducing GridIron

SendGrid and Iron.io have been friends for a while, but recently we met up with them at a hackathon and got into an interesting discussion. We were talking about all the beneficial ways in which we could use our services together and decided it would be best to share these awesome examples with our customers.

So today, we are publishing the examples we worked on to showcase some potential use cases of combining SendGrid with Iron.io.

GridIron consists of five main examples right now:

• Hello, SendGrid: a simple demonstration of using IronWorker to send emails using SendGrid

• Queue-Based Emailing: an evolution of Hello, SendGrid that uses a pull queue to give you a more scalable, robust email sending solution that gives you full control over how quickly emails are sent out.

• Fanout: an example that shows how to use IronMQ’s push queues to fan out data to multiple processors. In this case, two IronWorker workers receive the data, and they send a text message through Twilio and send an email through SendGrid.

• Github Notifications: an example that shows how to use Github’s webhooks to trigger IronWorker workers. The workers send emails to the repo owner whenever specified branches are committed to, and ignores the other notifications.

• Markov Bot: the most powerful demonstration we could think of, the Markov Bot will accept an email from the Inbound Parse API, use it to queue up a worker, and process that email. The bot will read your first line, and try to guess the next word you’d use, just like your phone does. It then emails back your line, with its guess appended to the end. It’s an email bot that was written in about 200 lines of Python.

Benefits

Normally when you think of services that provide both message queues and transactional email, Amazon comes to mind. However, these services struggle when it comes to webhooks. Amazon SES currently does not have the capability to receive emails. Also to implement webhooks you would have to setup endpoints in EC2 and that requires a lot of overhead. With GridIron you can take advantage of this event-based workflow immediately.

We’re really excited to share GridIron with you and we hope our examples are helpful. A big “thank you” to Iron.io for the great collaboration and if you have any ideas for future mashups, leave us a comment below.

So why should you join us on this leg of the tour? Here are the Top 10 Reasons you should become an Inbox Insider and join us at SendGrid Delivered in Europe next month.

Top 10 Reasons to Attend SendGrid Delivered International

1. Get the inside scoop on all things email from top industry leaders (like Carly Brantz, Denise Hulce, and Brian O’Neill)

2. Receive 1 on 1 feedback and deliverability tips from the experts (like Martyn Davies, Amy Mustoe, and Ken Apple)

3. Discover how to stay in the good graces of the top ISPs (we’re talking about you Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook)

4. Learn how to get the most out of your SendGrid account

5. Become a master of SendGrid’s APIs

6. Network with your fellow developers and marketers

7. Enjoy complimentary food and drinks (including an always entertaining cocktail hour)

8. Receive SendGrid swag (something both practical…and fun)

9. Enjoy an afternoon away from the office (who doesn’t love that)

10. It’s FREE!

Whether you’re a marketer or a developer, SendGrid Delivered will teach you valuable tips that will turn you into an email deliverability pro. Here’s what some of our past attendees have had to say:

“It was a lovely event, first class content and great people.” 

“There seemed to be intention behind every detail, from the presentations, to the chilled bottles of H2O, to the functional shoulder bags. I was grateful for the Transactional Email 101 [presentation].” 

“When is the next one? Sign me up!!!”

We’d love to see you out on tour with us. Sign up now for free and follow all of the SendGrid Delivered fun on Twitter with #SendGridDelivered.

Every email you send has to contend with the dreaded spam folder and sadly, 1/5 of them lose the battle. What kind of email are we talking about? Confirmations, reminders, shipping notifications, receipts, password resets, and more.

So how can you help your email win this fight? We know that sometimes trying to ensure that your email stays out of the spam folder can seem like a big task. So to help you remember the best practices that will help your email delivery, we put together this fun “Top Tips” video that will help you make it to the inbox in no time.

In this video, learn about:

• Permission Marketing Techniques
• Authentication
• Blacklists
• Spam Traps
• The CAN-SPAM Act

For a more in-depth look at how to stay out of the spam folder, download our free guide.

The following is a guest post from SendGrid’s Events Team.

We’re excited to be sponsoring and providing mentorship at the upcoming inaugural Hack4Colorado (part of the National Day of Civic Hacking) this May 31-June 2nd at Galvanize. We’re always looking for the next great idea, app, or startup to spring forth from the great minds of the Colorado entrepreneurial community, and this hackday presents the perfect storm for that discovery.

On June 1st and 2nd over 5,000 hackers will be participating in 87 events across the country to “collaboratively create, build, and invent using publicly-released data, code, and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states, and our country.” We love the idea of being able to see more great ideas blossom from a nationwide day focused on collaboration and change. And as a graduate of TechStars-Boulder, we appreciate the importance of community support, in turning an idea into a hack, which might just evolve into a product.

We also know that a lot of these great ideas will need to rely on email to fuel their product. (For inspiration, check out how one of SendGrid’s customers, TapGram, helps stroke victims send email.)

SendGrid Developer Evangelist, Brandon West, will be on site throughout the event to mentor the participants and to help his fellow developers implement SendGrid’s robust set of APIs.

To get a jump start on the fun, join Brandon and other representatives of the APIs and data sets that will be on site at the hackday during a Google Hangout info session this Friday, May 17th from 12-1pm Mountain Time.

We love the startup community here in CO (who’ll be joining us at Boulder Startup Week this week?) and think that this event will really showcase the talent and ambition that makes our community tick. Even better, all of these hacks will be for the betterment of CO with themes that include:

• Sports and Fitness
• Health and Wellness
• Sustainability
• Veterans
• Tourism and Education

As citizens of this great community, we all can surely appreciate the potential for civic development within these tracks and others, and, like you, we can’t wait to see what the teams create.

Now is the perfect time to register…it’s free! Keep an eye out for SendGrid at the event and catch us tweeting about it with the hashtags #hackforchange and #hack4CO. See you there!