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If you have extra sharp eyes, you may have noticed that School Interviews emails now come from bookings@schoolintervie.ws instead of bookings@schoolinterviews.com.au (or .ca, .oc.nz or .co.uk). Read on to find out how this tiny change makes a big difference!

School Interviews is built on Google's Appengine system, so it seemed to make sense to use Appengine's built-in email delivery service to deliver emails. But as School Interviews has grown, we've had increasing numbers of complaints that emails didn't arrive. Sometimes it was easy to tell why (a bad email address, for instance), but because Appengine's email service provides no feedback, most of the time we were left in the dark.

At the same time, we got more calls where the message turned up in the spam folder. It seems that other Appengine users are employing the system to send out spam, so mail servers regarded messages from the Appengine servers with increasing suspicion.

The answer to both these problems was to build our own email server. This server had to have the same name for all our country domains (schoolinterviews.com.au, schoolinterviews.ca, schoolinterviews.co.nz and schoolinterviews.co.uk), so we chose the compact schoolintervie.ws domain name.

Because the new server's reputation is not tarnished by anyone else, we've got a spotless score on the spam blacklists. We've set up an alphabet soup of anti-spam protocols (SPF, DKIM and DMARK for the geeks) so email servers know they can trust messages from us, and we've seen just one case of an email server rejecting a message as spam. To put that in perspective, the email server recently sent over 26,000 emails in one day without breaking a sweat.

As you can probably tell, we're rather pleased with the new email server. It's taken a lot of work behind the scenes, but School Interviews emails are now much more likely to get through.

Last updated Thu 22 Dec 2022 by School Interviews.