Getting Email Delivered - the ISIPP SuretyMail Blog

Anybody who sends email has seen them, in one form or another - those SMTP error codes, often returned in bounced email, such as “550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable” or “550 5 2 1 mail from refused spam site.” These are often in response to SMTP commands that have ‘gone wrong’ between your email server that sent the email, and the receiving email server that is unable to deliver it (or refuses to deliver it) for some reason. But what exactly do they mean? And why should you care? (’SMTP’ stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.) First, here is a list of SMTP messages and error messages, and what each message is supposed to say and mean

We recently had occasion to write down in great deal the exact definitions of the various levels of opt-in when it comes to building email marketing lists or other types of email lists. Because there is some confusion on this, especially where one method of list-building may have more than one name, we thought that we’d share these descriptions and definitions of Confirmed Opt In (COI), Double Opt In, Single Opt In, Opt In, Transactional, and One to One (1 to 1) email with you.

I recently had the pleasure of working with journalist Karen Bannen, on an article that she was doing for BtoB Online. Karen interviewed both myself and R. Dave Lewis for the piece, in which she distilled down to their essence 5 ways to improve your email deliverability.

Often the way that you find out that a user’s email address is no longer valid is that you get a bounce back (”user not found”). But sometimes a user will switch email addresses, and they will actually try to notify you. What do you do then?

We recently had a customer contact us to ask us whether a particular vendor’s Permission Pass system was legitimate, because to them it seemed to cross the line. Smart customer! Because, in fact, this particular vendor (no, I’m not going to name them) is not only conducting Permission Pass in the completely wrong way - but in a way that would be sure to have gotten our customer in hot water with the ISPs and spam filters!

We regularly get questions and comments, both in the course of our business day, and in casual conversation, which make clear that there is something that people just aren’t getting - so here it is, put as plainly and clearly as we can put it: If you get too many spam complaints, your email is going to be junkfoldered.

Most legitimate mail senders know to process bounce messages. This means that if they get what is called a “hard bounce” for an email address on their list (meaning that the bounce tells them that the email address simply doesn’t exist), they remove the email address from their list permanently. But more and more ISPs are inserting the bounce message right into your mail log, right at the time of the SMTP transaction, instead. If you don’t check your mail logs regularly, you’ll never see the bounce.