For several years now, German ISPs and webmails have been tightening their policies towards the advertisers targeting German recipients.
Recently, you might have noticed that German ISPs have rejected part of your email stream pointing out a generic PTR as the reason of rejection.
In order to improve your chances to deliver communications to German ISPs and webmails, you’ll need to follow their rules:
As such, to comply with their policies, you’ll need to use dedicated IP(s) with personalized PTR reflecting your sending domain name. If you fail to comply with this rule, you might experience delivery/deliverability issues towards the largest German ISPs.
Below, you can see the market share for ISPs / Webmails in germany.
From the above pie chart, we can see that GMX and Web.de are covering more than 50% of the market share.
GMX and Web.de have very similar policies, the most important ones are:
- The delivery email server must have a static IP address. Additionally, it has to be configured correctly and needs to provide a valid HELO, as well as MX, A, and PTR resource records (reverse DNS entry). The PTR-RR in particular must not correspond to the preset generic record of the host.
- Mass mailing or sending of emails with commercial content is restricted to users who have explicitly given their consent. The recipient must be given an easy option of protesting against the transmission of emails of this kind.
- Mass mails or emails with commercial content must contain a valid legal section. This includes valid, non-electronic contact information such as the complete postal address and the telephone number.
The part stating “The PTR-RR in particular must not correspond to the preset generic record of the host” means that in order to send emails to the related Webmails, you’ll need to use dedicated IP address(es) with a PTR record (reverse DNS) corresponding to the subdomain or domain name used as a from email address for your communications.
Example:
IP address: 91.121.7.56
Hostname (PTR): mail-007-056.ovh.com
From email address: news@communication.deliverability.guru
To make the above compliant with German ISPs/Webmails rules, we need to change my setup to have something like that:
IP address: 91.121.7.56
Hostname (PTR): mta1.communication.deliverability.guru
From email address: news@communication.deliverability.guru
This is another reason to use dedicated IP(s) instead of shared IPs therefore building your own sending reputation towards ISPs/Webmails and having your personalized PTR.