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

Considered the leader in their field, YLighting is the largest retailer and distributor of modern, high-end lighting, ranging from lamps and chandeliers to energy-efficient options. While YLighting offers both beautiful and functional fixtures, they understand that a successful business is based on more than a great product. Says CEO Jeffrey Zwelling, “We’re the largest distributor of modern lighting, and we’ve got here by providing awesome customer service, and an excellent selection at a great price.”

We are often asked by volume email senders just why we urge people to use confirmed opt-in (or “double opt-in”) whenever possible. After all, they know that they are being ethical and only adding to their mailing lists people whom they believe really want their mailings. Why should they have to go through the added “hassle” of using confirmed opt-in? Here’s why.

It’s always nice when an independent third-party study substantiates what we’ve been saying all along. In this case, a study by Harris Interactive on behalf of Merkle (the database marketing people) has found that between 73 to 75% of people hit “unsubscribe” because either they feel that they are getting email from you too often, or that it is not relevant, or both.

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.

There is a meme going around the email marketing industry right now that takes the term “best practices” as it relates to email, and reduces it to “common practices.”
This is a very dangerous, slippery slope on which to pin your email deliverability. To suggest that best practices aren’t really best practices, but [...]

Today I want to talk about a practice that can really get your email in trouble: including attachments in email without first communicating to the recipient that you will be doing so.

We have a customer who sends email out on behalf of a very large, very well known institution in the financial investment world. Some of these mailings lists are paid mailing lists. By which I mean that the users paid to receive these emails. And yet, they still report it as spam. Why would they do this? Here’s why.

A fascinating, and a bit shocking, study was released today, rating how well online commerce sites do when it comes to responding to prospect and customer email queries. Not very, it turns out.

We’ve talked previously about why all the email addresses you send from (i.e. your email’s “return address”) should really exist. It’s because if they don’t, you’re email is going to get junk foldered, both due to spam complaints, and because ISPs actually test whether your from address exists. But there are some email addresses - used as “From:” addresses - that even if you create them on your system - even if they really do exist - you should just never use.

SilverPop has just announced their new “Share to Social” service, and it’s a pretty interesting idea. Now, while tell-a-friend systems tend to invite users to spam their friends, encouraging a user to post your email on their own social networking profile page is very different. Of course, you don’t need to use a special system to do that

The results of two studies which looked at whether people are less inclined to be honest in email are out, and the answer is a big “yes”. Based on these studies, at least, people tend to lie a lot in email. In fact, the two studies, published jointly as a paper entitled “Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining”, found that in their tests, subjects were likely to lie as much as 92% of the time!

While I’m off at the last of the three conferences in four weeks (actually I’m running the Boulder Business Retreat), I thought I’d share this little example of what not to do with your email marketing. I should be back more regularly next week; I hope you’ve missed me as much as I’ve missed you! Today’s shining example of a company that just doesn’t get it is AmericaRX.com.

Challenge response systems have been around long enough now that pretty much everybody has an opinion on them. The end users who use challenge response systems seem to love them. But legitimate email senders often never respond to challenges, and so the end users are actually missing out on a lot of wanted email.

We’ve talked in the past about why address book importing is just not ok. But in addition to the fact that it trains people to enter their passwords at third-party sites, and to the fact that when you send out all those invitations it makes you look like a spammer, there’s another big reason to not do address book importing.

We got the following in the mail this week from United Airlines: “Watch your email during the week at August 11 to receive a valuable limited-time offer from United for international travel this fall.” Something has gone horribly wrong when in order for an email marketing campaign to be effective, you first have to send your customers something via the post office to alert them to watch their inbox.

You may or may not have heard the furor over Spamza - the website where anybody can enter any email address, and have that email address instantly signed up for hundreds of newsletter mailing lists. Of course, everybody is very upset because this site facilitates people getting spammed. BUT, there is also a very important lesson here for email marketers, newsletter publishers, and just about any other email sender who maintains a mailing list.

Three things happened within the last 24 hours which lead me to feel that today we need to talk about email personalization.

One of the most frustrating things for commercial and volume email senders is that different ISPs have different standards for what they require in order to ensure that your email gets delivered. On top of that, many ISPs don’t seem to adhere to the agreed industry standards in terms of how their receiving mail servers interact with the sending mail servers - for example five different ISPs may use five different SMTP error codes when they bounce an email because the email address doesn’t exist, even though people believe there to be one generally accepted code for that situation (along the lines of “550 user unknown”).

Address book importing. Odds are good that if you aren’t doing it, you are either thinking about doing it, or you know someone who is doing it or thinking about doing it. Because, you see, it’s all the rage. It’s also an awful practice.

What do a spammer and two legitimate email marketers have in common? They all had their brand new IP addresses blocked as soon as they started using them. And you can too. Here’s how.

CAN-SPAM requires that you include your physical mailing address in each and every bulk mailing such as an email newsletter or other mail to a mailing list. For some reason this requirement confuses people - maybe because it’s so straight-forward, and people are used to complex, convoluted, and contradictory (the Three Cs of legislative drafting!) language when it comes to the law.

Here’s one of those things which can be subtle, and yet so critical. It can bite you in the back without your realizing it, and then six months later you wonder why you have gangrene in your knees - it’s that difficult, to connect the dots. Until someone tells you about it and then you have that forehead-slapping moment - of course!

You know, sometimes it’s the silliest, most boneheaded things which trip us up. This is true for your email too. See if you can spot the mistakes in this email (this is a genuine, unretouched email, other than our changing the name of the service to “Geegaw” in order to protect the hapless).

Once upon a time somebody - somewhere - somehow decided that it would be good idea to send email to their mailing lists using an email address in their “From:” field that didn’t really exist. But sending email “from” an email address that doesn’t really exist is a spectacularly bad idea. In fact, it may even qualify as the Epic Fail of “from” email address ideas.

One of the (many) things that we explain to people in our Email Deliverability Handbook is that while you must comply with CAN-SPAM, you shouldn’t say that you comply with CAN-SPAM.

Here’s something that often comes up in discussions with email senders. You really really need to remove the email addresses of people who want to opt-out - that is, to unsubscribe - from your mailings lists as soon as humanly possible. Even though CAN-SPAM gives you ten days to do it.

Just mention the term ‘DNS’, and many email senders’ eyes glaze over; say “rDNS” and a look of panic may replace the glaze. Yet, not only are these not complicated concepts, but having rDNS set up is critical to having consistent, good email delivery. To test whether you have rDNS set up, you can use our handy test rDNS tool.

Yesterday we talked about why you should give each of your customers their own IP address. But for various reasons, not everybody can do that - at least not right away - and so, as promised, today we are going to talk about segregating your outbound mail across different IP addresses based on opt-in quality.

Over at our email accreditation service, SuretyMail, we strongly urge our senders who provision or otherwise host their customers’ outgoing email to give each customer their own outbound IP address.

In all of the focus that email marketers, newsletter publishers, and other volume email senders put on tweaking their content, format, and other aspects of their email to help maximize deliverability, they often overlook the scheduling of their mailings - by which I mean when they send their mailings, and how often they send them. Yet this can have a definite impact on your deliverability! Here then, are the top 5 mistakes that email senders make in scheduling their mailings.