Getting Email Delivered - the ISIPP SuretyMail Blog

SuretyMail is pleased to welcome Cyber-Sea, Inc. to our family of accredited email senders. Cyber-Sea, Inc. operates Proposal Kit which produces templates and software that allow companies to easily create such business documents as proposals, contracts, resumes and business plans. With over 10 years in business and clients in over 100 countries, Proposal Kit is a leader in its field.

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.

We’ve very excited to announce our free (yes, free) email deliverability toolbar for both Firefox and Internet Explorer! With this toolbar you can instantly access many of our free email deliverability assistance resource from anywhere on the Internet! Do an IP address lookup, check reverse DNS (rDNS), check various blacklists, and more!

We have officially rolled out our Feedback Loop Reports service today, with its own spiffy section on our website, and we couldn’t be prouder.

Every so often we run into a sender who has a sense of entitlement - or even righteous indignation - about how an ISP should, must - even has to - accept their email. Whether because it’s “requested” or opt-in or because it “complies with CAN-SPAM”, the sender gets all in our face about how a given ISP has a responsiblity and duty to accept their email. Sometimes they even rant that it’s required by {CAN-SPAM| tort law | the 1st Amendment | insert your favourite rant here}. Except, that’s completely wrong.

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.

You may not have heard of drip email marketing, or email drip marketing, but I can assure you that you know what it is. You have either sent it, or received it, or in some other way come into contact with it. Wikipedia - not always the most reliable source, but in this case accurate - describes drip email this way: “Email drip marketing is a form of e-mail marketing where a company sends (”drips”) email messages to subscribers on a scheduled basis established using e-mail marketing software.”

A common complaint that we hear, particularly from email senders who are signed up for feedback loops from ISPs, is “why won’t the ISPs let us know who is complaining and clicking “this is spam” on our email, so that we can unsubscribe them?” There are a couple of reasons for that.

Many email senders rage against the machine - the spam filtering machine, that is. And it’s easy to understand why: legitimate email getting caught and misidentified as spam - what we call “false positives” - is a big problem. But, consider this: what would the email world look like without spam filters?

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!

AOL has announced today that their feedback loop will be switching over to the ARF format - only. This means that if you are an email sender of any volume, it’s time for you to start being able to deal with ARF format spam reports if you aren’t already.