Getting Email Delivered - the ISIPP SuretyMail Blog

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 talked before about things that can artificially supress open rates, and the dangers inherent in not being aware of the issues. This was brought home today by a colleague, who writes about an experience they had with being dropped from a mailing list that they read regularly because they read in “no images” mode, causing the sender to assume that they weren’t reading their mailings.

Back when I co-founded Habeas, we came up with the at-that-time novel idea to have our accredited senders insert special headers in their outbound email. Those headers were a signal to the receiving email servers that our senders had been accredited and the email was promised to be “not spam.”

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 recently had one of our email accreditation customers ask us whether we would contact all of the blacklists listed at on a particular site on their behalf, because the site listed their IP address’ reputation with these blacklists as “neutral”.

We’ve talked in the past about how important it is to be sure that your email renders well in many different email clients and devices, and also generally to be sure that your email is easy to read on mobile devices. But have you ever wondered what the majority of your users are using to read their email?

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.

We’ve talked more than once here about how not just your content, but the formatting of your content, can make a big difference to your email deliverability. It’s something about which I can not put too fine a point, as some people just don’t get it – others don’t believe it – and yet others feel that it shouldn’t matter, gosh darnit, especially if their list building practices are kosher and their users really want their email. But it does matter.

We’re always thinking about ways that we can boost our customers’ deliverability and email reptutation to previously unheard of heights. And, as we’ve mentioned before, open rates are becoming increasingly important. That is because ISPs look at your open rates to see if people are really interested in receiving and reading your email. So I got to thinking about things that can artificially suppress your open rates.

Last week we talked about how if your email is not “mobile friendly”, that is, if it doesn’t render well on mobile devices, your email will not bring you the results for which you are hoping. And because once someone reads your email on their mobile device, they aren’t as likely to read it on their computer, this is very important. Remember that open and click-through rates can directly affect your deliverability.

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?

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.

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).

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.

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.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an important authentication mechanism to help protect both email receivers and email senders from forged and phishing email. Here’s how to set up and use DKIM.

Hopefully by now you have read our article about what the big Yahoo DMARC p=reject rejection means for you and your email. And you may or may not be aware that yesterday AOL did the exact same thing, also publishing a DMARC policy of p=reject, which means, essentially, “reject any email coming from a yahoo.com or aol.com address if it was not sent through a Yahoo or AOL mail server.”

SPF and DKIM are important resources to help secure different aspects of the mail flow. One of the problems left unsolved by SPF and DKIM, however, was the specification of the actions that needed to be taken at the receiving site based on the information conveyed by these protocols. Enter DMARC.

One of the first things that a responsible ESP must deal with, before starting to mail on behalf of their customers, is Reverse DNS (rDNS from now on). This is true for businesses that send out their own email, as well. This is our tutorial on how to set up rDNS.

We’ve heard a lot about whitelisting and blacklisting, but many are unfamiliar with the term “greylisting” and, to a lesser extent, “rate limiting.” Greylisting and rate limiting are two additional but lesser used methods which some ISPs may employ to attempt to deal with spam and/or a sudden influx of bulk email.

It’s unusual that we post something requesting informtion from our readers, but we need your help. ISIPP SuretyMail is studying how closely what email marketers think about how those on their mailing lists view email marketing messages matches up with what these end users actually think.

Back when it was first discovered that spammers were scraping WHOIS registrations for email addresses, private registration of domains became popular among legitimate businesses. Unfortunately, like so many other things, registering your domain privately (meaning that your domain registration information is essentially cloaked, and anonymous to the world) has been adopted and thus ruined by the spammers, phishers, and malware pushers of the world. Now, if you are a legitimate sender, having a privately registered domain will hurt your email deliverability.

There are many examples of when you can do something, but perhaps shouldn’t, and nowhere is this more evident (and prevalent) then in what is permissable under CAN-SPAM. For purposes of this article, in particular, we are going to talk about adding a customer’s email address to your marketing mailing list without asking them first.

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 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.