email-best-practices

What This Skill Does

The email-best-practices skill serves as a comprehensive architectural and operational framework for developers building email infrastructure. It provides technical guidance for ensuring high deliverability, legal compliance, and system reliability. The skill acts as an expert consultant for setting up DNS-level authentication like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, managing complex list hygiene, and distinguishing between transactional and marketing messaging strategies. It offers a blueprint for implementing idempotent sending patterns, handling webhook-driven delivery feedback, and maintaining suppression lists to protect sender reputation.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/christina-de-martinez/email-best-practices

Ensure your project repository has the necessary permissions to pull from the openclaw/skills registry.

Use Cases

1. Troubleshooting deliverability: Use this when emails are consistently landing in spam folders or being rejected by major providers like Gmail or Yahoo.
2. Compliance auditing: Use this to ensure your signup forms and email footers meet the strict requirements of CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL regulations.
3. Architecture planning: Use this during the early stages of app development to design a robust email pipeline that includes double opt-in flows, idempotent retry logic, and automated bounce handling.
4. Migration: Use this when moving your email sending service to a new provider to ensure DNS settings are migrated correctly without tanking your domain reputation.

Example Prompts

1. "I am seeing a 15% bounce rate on my newsletter campaign. How can I use the list management best practices to clean my database and improve my sender reputation?"
2. "Walk me through the DNS record requirements for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to ensure my password reset emails aren't flagged as phishing."
3. "Help me differentiate between transactional and marketing emails for our new user onboarding flow. Which ones require an unsubscribe link versus just a consent checkbox?"

Tips & Limitations

• Prioritize authentication: Always verify SPF/DKIM before scaling volume.
• Automate list hygiene: Manual list cleaning is error-prone; rely on webhook events to trigger suppression updates.
• Compliance first: Never purchase email lists. Consent must be explicit and documented.
• Limitations: This skill provides architectural guidance and best practices but does not execute direct changes to your DNS provider or email service provider (ESP) settings automatically. You must implement the logic within your application code based on the generated architectural blueprints.