Spam, delivery, email and more
On the heels of JDs post about building relationships with ISPs, many of our Abacus customers and our ISP contacts have been commenting that boxes of meat are always welcome.
Please, remember to send them boxes of meat.
Meat may not get your email delivered, but it will make the ISPs remember you fondly.
Following on from previous posts here, here and here, JD Falk discusses ways to get your email into the inbox.
Tactics that will actually improve your deliverability, yet have no bearing on what the ISP staff thinks about you:
- Sending mail that your recipients actually want
- Keeping your list clean (such that you don’t send unwanted mail)
- Using good data sources (such that you don’t send unwanted mail)
- Keeping a squeaky clean infrastructure (such that you don’t send unwanted mail)
- Getting on Sender Score Certified (which requires not sending unwanted mail)
All in all, the best way to get mail into the inbox is to send mail your recipients want. Make it relevant to what they want and it will get delivered.
Hat tip: Matt
Al posted an analysis on DNSBL Resource about the effectiveness of the FiveTen blacklist.
He says:
Analysis of the raw data suggests to me that Fiveten’s poor (high) false positive rates is primarily due to Fiveten’s listing of “bulk mailers that don’t require closed loop confirmation opt-in from all their customers.” As a result, Fiveten has thousands of senders listed that have never send spam, specifically because they choose not to utilize double opt-in. This means that Fiveten is effectively a tool that blocks “things the maintainer doesn’t like,” which is a wholly different criteria than blocking spam. Against my own data, it appears that there is no direct correlation between spam and the blacklist maintainer’s choices for listing criteria.
I’ve not been worrying much about FiveTen listings with my clients over the years. Analysis of delivery logs shows that FiveTen is not widely used by large receiver sites and the number of emails rejected related to a FiveTen listing is relatively low.
Matt talks about a new marketing report from the ThinData Newsletter.
The Newsletter offers the following recommendations on using viral marketing as part of your next email campaign.
- State Your Purpose. Be very clear about your intentions with your viral program and about what you plan to do with the email addresses that you will be collecting.
- Respect Personal Information. Keep in-mind that the addresses you collect are not subscribers until they choose to subscribe themselves. To comply with the rules set out by Canada’s privacy legislation (PIPEDA) you should not retain this information or assume you can send any follow-up emails to them.
- Clearly Identify Yourself to Referrals. When you send a triggered message to the email addresses entered by the original referral source, use your email address as the from address address as opposed to the referral source’s email address (see example below). In this way, you are demonstrating that you respect the referral source’s email identity.
- Reduce Risks of Abuse. Use a CAPTCHA in the form that collects the email addresses. A CAPTCHA – which is short for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart” – helps to dramatically reduce the potential abuse that spammers can inflict on you or on the owners of the emails you have captured.
- Answer the Question: What’s In It For Me? Go beyond sending the referred friend a link. Rather, describe concisely why they are receiving the email and the value of taking action.
Email Insider has another post discussing how important relevancy is to getting email delivered.
A number of groups provide tools for monitoring email performance.
Some of these tools are provided by ISPs, like Hotmail and AOL have postmaster webpages. Hotmail also provides things like SNDS so you can monitor what Hotmail is seeing about your network.
Al has a new blacklist stats center over at DNSBL.com. Of interest is the accuracy of some of the widely used lists like Spamhaus, Spamcop, and PSBL. Other lists like FiveTen were wildly inaccurate. In fact, Al has shown that blocking mail from any IP with a 7 in it is more accurate (more spam hits, less non-spam hits) than FiveTen.
ReturnPath provides free reputation lookup and monitoring based on the data they acquire.
The MAAWG Sender Subcommittee has published a Sender Best Current Practices document.
This document details what the current best practices in the sending industry are. Summarized the document says:
Al Iverson comments on information from Craig Spiezel at the Exacttarget customer conference this week. Craig confirms that MSN/Hotmail is also looking at user engagement, opens and moving mail out of the spam folder as part of their delivery metrics.
Ultimately, engagement is the key to mitigating delivery issues when sending to Hotmail.
- Stop mailing to subscribers that never open or click on your email messages.
- Don’t reactivate old, bounced addresses just to see if they’ll go through…today. (A few might, but most won’t, and Hotmail will notice.)
- Stay true to permission. Don’t buy lists, stick to clear opt-in (not opt-out). Don’t bury the “we’ll send you email” notice in a privacy policy or legal notice.
I expect that more ISPs than AOL and MSN/Hotmail are looking at recipient engagement or are investigating how to measure it and incorporate it into their delivery decision process. It does reinforce my earlier blog post about relevancy and how important it is for delivery.
Hat tip: Mark
Yahoo announced this morning that over the course of the next few weeks Yahoo would roll out a new feature to their email that blocks any unauthenticated email from eBay and PayPal.
In a blog post Nikki Dugan says:
Our weapon is a technology Yahoo! spearheaded called DomainKeys, which uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender. In overly simplified terms, if the email’s originating domain ain’t really eBay.com or PayPal.com, it ain’t going through.
DomainKeys / Domain Keys Internet Mail have seen steady adoption by senders and receivers over the last few years. As more and more companies are signing outgoing mail, more and more receivers can make delivery decisions based on those signatures. This is the first time a sender and a receiver have announced an agreement that all non-signed email will be rejected.
Hat tip: Matt
