Getting Email Delivered - the ISIPP SuretyMail Blog

The quick and dirty: The main immediate and relevant difference between the Canada Anti Spam Law (CASL) and the United States’ CAN-SPAM, is that the CASL requires true opt-in, and it requires that the contact information within the email remain a viable way to contact the sender for at least 60 days.

The first true marketing email did not arrive until 1978, when a company called DEC (which became part of Compaq, now HP) sent an invitation to the product launch of a new machine to all addresses in the ARPANET directory on the USA’s West Coast. They were heavily criticized for the act, which broke the ARPANET appropriate use policy, and everyone else was reminded of the rule.

While we know that there are obvious missteps to avoid when ensuring that your email is not marked as spam, there are some commonly overlooked practices, or lack thereof, that can still cause a legitimate email to be marked as such. One of the biggest mistakes that a well-intentioned organization can make is to not properly manage new subscribers.

Email marketing firm Silverpop, released study results about the efficacy of email campaigns. Silverpop took a look at emails that were sent during 2011 and the first quarter of 2012. The email messages analyzed were sent by Silverpop’s clients, by over 1,100 different brands. They looked at several different types of email messages, including transactional messages, promotional emails, content-based newsletters, and notifications. The data that they found pertaining to click-through rates, open rates and unsusubscribe rates were very informative.

We wanted to do a mid-year check-in to remind you to make sure that your emailing practices are staying in tip-top shape, and that your email marketing campaigns were minding their p’s and q’s to ensure maximum deliverability.

For those of you who have read the intro of our Email Deliverability Handbook, you know that we mentioned that the first true marketing email didn’t arrive until 1978, when a company called DEC (which became part of Compaq, now HP) sent an invitation to the product launch of a new machine to all addresses […]

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.

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

If you either send or receive email in the course of business – and you probably do if you’re reading this – then you need to have a written email archiving and email retention policy. And at least as importantly, you need to follow it. Religiously.