Getting Email Delivered - the ISIPP SuretyMail Blog

Did you know that setting up an automated “I’m out of the office” vacation auto responder message can hurt your email deliverability? In fact, there are a few different ways that those automatic vacation reply messages can hurt your email delivery, and for that reason, we advise you not to use them at all or, if you must, to use them very carefully.

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.”

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!

Often the way that you find out that a user’s email address is no longer valid is that you get a bounce back (“user not found”).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?

What if I told you that there is a way that you can get your email into the inbox 100% of the time? And what if I told you that it was guaranteed?

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’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.

I’m sure that you know that more and more people are reading email on the go (I, for example, read a large percentage of my email on my Sidekick, many others read email on their Blackberrys). In fact last year Marketing Sherpa determined that 64% of key decision makers are reading email on their mobile devices. Reading your email on their mobile devices. Have you ever stopped to think about what that means in terms of your email deliverability?

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.

Let me tell you about one of the coolest email platforms about which you’ve never heard. It’s called Eyejot. Eyejot is a video messaging platform, but with a couple of important twists. First of all, it’s video email. But it’s video email that requires nothing more than a webcam and a web browser. That’s it.

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?

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.

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”).

I’m sorry that we didn’t post a new article yesterday but, you see, my hard drive crashed. And so today I want to talk to you about the importance of regular backups, and to share with you my own backup set-up which, I’m happy to say, was very effective.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

If you are a business or commercial email sender, you can’t help but have heard about the big issue with Yahoo that unfolded over this past week, having to do with Yahoo, DMARC, “p=reject”, and Yahoo’s rejection and bouncing of billions of pieces of email. But what does it mean for you, the commercial email sender?

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.

A lot of business email senders are wondering just what Gmail’s new “tabs” feature, now turned on by default for all Gmail users, means for delivery of the commercial email that they send. Will marketing email now go by default into the ‘Promotions’ tab, where Gmail users will probably rarely look? Will email go to the promotions folder instead of the spam folder? Just what will be the effect of Gmail tabs for email senders?

As we’ve talked about at length before, web-based email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, take into account the open rates and click-through rates associated with the email that you send to their users. If your rates are too low, they will start putting your email in the spam folder. But in addition to the obvious concerns and issues related to open rates, there is another aspect of these web-based mail providers – and Gmail in particular – to which nobody gives a thought, even though it is quietly killing email deliverability for countless legitimate, ethical email marketers and other email senders.

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.

We are pleased to offer our newest resource page, “How to Find Your Full Email Headers in AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Mozilla, Apple Mail and More!”

This resource features a full explanation of what an email header is, and why it may be being asked for, along with full instructions for finding email headers in Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, Excite, Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla, and Apple Mail, with more to come!

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

Today I want to let you know about another free resource that we offer to the general public along with our customers: a free tool that allows you to determine whether your reverse DNS (rDNS) is set up properly.