I've got an old website that I've been nursing along while we try to build its replacement. People complain a lot about mail not getting delivered. Mail seems to get through pretty well to large domains like gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc. but it tends to get bogged down or dropped entirely from domains managed by universities or other small IT shops.
Part of the issue is that all outgoing mail is routed through Amazon SES. I've set up SPF records and DKIM for our mail and this seems important, but some mail just doesn't get through.
There is a particular type of email we send out by cron -- it reminds people when certain digital property they bought is going to expire. I'd like to get some idea of whether these emails are even arriving or not. I thought of using a transparent gif or something, but there are two problems with that:
our emails are plain text emails, not HTML
most modern mail systems and clients will block images and scripts by default when displaying mail.
Does anyone have ideas about how to deal with this situation? For starters, I want to know what percentage of these emails are actually arriving. In the event that some are NOT arriving, I'd like to know which domains are having trouble.
