Orange has strict consent rules that must be followed in order to send successfully to their customers. It is also important to send relevant content to their customers to keep complaints low, engagement high and to stay off of blocklists. While following their best practice guidelines doesn’t guarantee inbox placement, it greatly increases your chances for success.
Best practices
- Ensure your IPs are signed up on the Signal Spam complaint feedback loop. Senders participating in Validity’s Certification program receive Signal Spam FBL data upon request.
- Use confirmed opt-in (COI) consent methods. Consent needs to be separated from terms and conditions. Check boxes cannot be pre-checked.
- Don’t include advertisements for other products or services with a transactional email. Orange considers transactional mails as purely functional.
- Do not send more than one reminder email for incomplete registrations.
- Include the list-unsubscribe header in all emails. The specified URL should either use the mailto: scheme or be an HTTP URL that unsubscribes the user with a single click without any further confirmations required.
- Send relevant content to encourage engagement. Orange considers engagement a good indicator of the relevance of a sender’s mails they consider this when making decisions to block or throttle. Use a preference center to allow subscribers to choose what email they want to receive from you to help improve engagement.
- Sign up with Validity Certification to receive preferential treatment at Orange.
- Authenticate all emails with Sender Policy Framework (SPF). Orange uses SPF to help identify you as the originator of the email.
- Contact Orange when using a new IP address. Orange does not require new IP addresses to be warmed up. Senders sending a large volume of mail to Orange using a new IP address should notify Orange at abuse@orange.fr. Senders participating in Validity’s Certification program also receive increased connection and throughput limits for new IP addresses.
- Respect Orange’s resources. Orange manages both @orange.fr and @wanadoo.fr addresses with the same MX servers but sometimes SMTP servers only accept one setting per delivery domain. Therefore, the 3 authorized simultaneous connections have to be shared between these 2 domains; for example: 2 for Orange.fr domain and 1 for wanadoo.fr.
- Do not request more than 5000 connections per hour if you are not part of Validity’s Certification program.
- There is no connection limit for Validity Certified senders.
- Send over a 100 emails per open connection
- Ensure you have access to the SMTP log files for clues on delivery issues. Orange indicates they can be very helpful when troubleshooting issues.
