{"id":26,"date":"2013-09-19T07:53:46","date_gmt":"2013-09-19T07:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mailchita.com\/?page_id=26"},"modified":"2013-09-19T07:53:46","modified_gmt":"2013-09-19T07:53:46","slug":"email-delivery","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mailchita.com\/email-delivery\/","title":{"rendered":"Email delivery"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
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<\/a>Key deliverability terms<\/td>\ntop \u21d1<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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Blacklist<\/b>: A list of senders or URLs (i.e. links) known or believed to be associated with spam.<\/p>\n

Organizations use their own or third-party blacklists to quickly tag incoming email from a blacklisted sender (or featuring a blacklisted URL) as spam. Such messages are commonly deleted or subjected to closer scrutiny before delivery.<\/p>\n

Read more about\u00a0email blacklists<\/a>\u00a0and how to know if you’re on one.<\/p>\n

Email authentication<\/b>: The processes, standards and technologies involved in verifying the identity of an email’s sender.<\/p>\n

Email that can be authenticated is less likely to be treated as spam.<\/p>\n

Read more about\u00a0email authentication<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Email certification<\/b>: The process where a third-party agency audits the email practices of a sender and, if the sender meets the appropriate standards, gives them a virtual stamp of approval.<\/p>\n

Certification agencies have agreements with various ISPs, webmail services and anti-spam technology providers that grant email from certified senders priority treatment.<\/p>\n

Certified email is more likely to get delivered by these partners and may also receive other benefits (such as never having images blocked from displaying).<\/p>\n

Read more about\u00a0email certification<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Feedback loop<\/b>: A subscription service offered by organizations managing email accounts: senders subscribed to a feedback loop (FBL) receive reports containing information on the sender’s emails that a recipient marked as spam.<\/p>\n

Most of the largest email account providers (internet services like Comcast or webmail services like Yahoo! Mail) offer feedback loops, though they require senders to fulfill certain criteria before being granted access.<\/p>\n

Read more about\u00a0feedback loops<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ISP<\/b>: Internet Service Provider.<\/p>\n

ISPs provide their customers (individuals and organizations) with internet connections. Large providers of webmail email accounts (like Gmail) are also commonly referred to as ISPs.<\/p>\n

ISPs play a major role in email marketing through their control of the transfer of mails to their customers’ email accounts. They use various tools to sort the flow of incoming messages and identify unwanted email.<\/p>\n

Unwanted email is normally deleted, rerouted to a junk file or folder, or delivered to the recipient’s inbox with some kind of “this is spam” warning attached.<\/p>\n

Sender reputation<\/b>: A reputation score assigned to an individual sender by organizations managing incoming email.<\/p>\n

The higher the score, the more likely they will deliver that sender’s emails to the end user.<\/p>\n

A reputation score is calculated using various criteria and measures, such as the number of\u00a0spam complaints<\/a>\u00a0generated by a sender and the quality of the infrastructure used to distribute the sender’s emails.<\/p>\n

Read more about sender reputation.<\/p>\n

Spam complaints<\/b>: Manual reports of spam from email users.<\/p>\n

Webmail services, for example, provide their customers with a “report spam” button. Email recipients can then use this button to mark a message as spam, even though the service itself delivered the message to the recipient’s inbox as a legitimate email.<\/p>\n

Using the button generates a spam complaint which is forwarded to the webmail service, providing them with useful intelligence for refining their anti-spam processes.<\/p>\n

The number of spam complaints a sender gets is an important factor in deciding how email services handle future emails from that sender. For example, excessive spam complaints can cause a sender to be added to a\u00a0blacklist<\/a>\u00a0(or removed from a whitelist).<\/p>\n

Read more about\u00a0spam complaints<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Spam filter<\/b>: Any technology or process used to examine incoming email with the aim of distinguishing between legitimate messages and spam.<\/p>\n

Spam filters may be applied at various stages of the email transfer. Large organizations, for example, use spam filters to sort email before it reaches the intended recipient.<\/p>\n

Messages identified as legitimate email are forwarded to the recipient’s email account. Messages identified as spam may be “filtered out” (i.e. deleted) or forwarded to the spam\/junk folder of the recipient’s account.<\/p>\n

Spam trap<\/b>: A spam trap is an email address created and used by anti-spam organizations, ISPs and others to identify spammers.<\/p>\n

A typical spam trap is an email address which is never used for correspondence or for signing up to mailing lists, but which is posted on a webpage somewhere. By definition, any email sent to that address is unsolicited and therefore spam.<\/p>\n

Read more about spam traps.<\/p>\n

Webmail service<\/b>: Any email account provider that allows its users to access their inbox on the web, simply by logging on to a website.<\/p>\n

The three most popular webmail services are Yahoo! Mail, Gmail (Google) and Windows Live Hotmail, who together provide email accounts to hundreds of millions of users.<\/p>\n

Webmail services are important to email marketers because:<\/p>\n

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<\/a>Introduction to email deliverability<\/td>\ntop \u21d1<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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Most people sending marketing email assume that pretty much all of it ends up where it’s supposed to go: in subscriber inboxes.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this isn’t true.<\/p>\n

A significant proportion of your email does not get delivered at all. And some of the emails that do get delivered get rerouted into the recipient’s junk folder, not their inbox.<\/p>\n

These delivery failures undermine your success. Not only are you spending time and money sending email that effectively disappears, but\u00a0you’re missing out on all the clicks, sales, downloads and registrations that those missing emails might have brought in<\/b>.<\/p>\n

And the news gets worse: the typical campaign reports offered by specialist email marketing software or services can’t help you get a grasp on the scale of the problem. It’s not unusual for up to 30% of your email to fail to reach the inbox.<\/p>\n

So why do emails go astray and how can you tell whether you have a problem?<\/p>\n

Bounces
\nAn email can encounter a variety of technical hitches that prevent it getting delivered.<\/p>\n

When the transfer suffers such a technical hitch, it usually sends an appropriate warning back to the sender…a so-called bounce.<\/p>\n

Such bounces come in various shapes and sizes, but for the sake of simplicity we can split them into permanent and temporary errors (often called “hard” and “soft” bounces respectively).<\/p>\n

Hard bounces occur when there is some technical problem that isn’t going away. A good example is when the destination email address no longer exists, like when someone moves jobs.<\/p>\n

Soft bounces occur when there is a temporary problem which might resolve itself later. A common example is when the recipient’s mailbox is full and can’t accept any new email.<\/p>\n

Sending systems usually give up on the transfer after encountering a hard bounce, but may have a few goes at resending a message if the problem is temporary.<\/p>\n

Anti-spam technologies
\nBounces are a manageable problem because you usually get feedback (the bounce message) when something goes wrong. In fact, most email marketing systems account for bounces in the campaign reports they produce.<\/p>\n

So you’ll see the number of emails sent out, the number that bounced and the difference reported as the number delivered.<\/p>\n

Don’t let that number lull you into a false sense of security.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

Because there are other delivery glitches that go largely unreported by the receiving system.<\/p>\n

These glitches are the result of anti-spam technologies tagging your emails as spam and either silently deleting them or redirecting them to spam\/junk folders.<\/p>\n

These rarely produce bounce messages or feedback. So there is no way for your software or service to assess the numbers involved.<\/p>\n

Even the very best opt-in email programs can fall foul of this problem in a world where there are so many different anti-spam technologies.<\/p>\n

What can you do?
\nThe first task is to monitor the extent of the problem. You need to know how many emails actually make it to the inbox each time you send out a message. And you need to know if any problem is a general one or associated with a particular ISP or webmail service.<\/p>\n

Here you have four choices:<\/p>\n

1. If you use an email marketing service, see if it offers inbox monitoring as an add-on feature
\n2. Sign up to a comprehensive enterprise-level deliverability auditing service that offers inbox monitoring tools
\n3. Setup test accounts at all the popular email account services used by your subscribers, and then check the results manually each time you send out email.
\n4. Use a self-service delivery monitoring tool like the one offered by\u00a0Delivery Watch<\/a><\/p>\n

Once you know where you have a problem, you can take the necessary action to correct it. Constant monitoring then tells you if this problem is (and remains) solved and alerts you to any new delivery issues that might crop up in the future.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

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<\/a>Sender reputation<\/td>\ntop \u21d1<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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One of the important functions of any organization that manages incoming email (like an Internet Service Provider, webmail service or corporate IT department) is preventing their users from getting spam.<\/p>\n

Until relatively recently, the main way such organizations identified spam was to look for clues in the actual email itself. In particular, they scrutinized subject lines and content for “spammy” words and phrases.<\/p>\n

While this let them filter out the obvious spam, such checks sometimes attached a “spam” tag to wanted, opt-in emails that happened to use spammy phrases quite legitimately.<\/p>\n

Another problem is that clever spammers adapted, regularly changing their email design and wording to beat the spam checks.<\/p>\n

Although this kind of spam check still goes on, anti-spam technologies now also look beyond the email itself to examine the sender. This is where the idea of sender reputation comes in. The better the sender’s reputation as a source of email, the more likely its emails will get delivered to the inbox. And vice versa.<\/p>\n

This leads us to three questions. What’s a sender? How is reputation measured? And how can you improve yours?<\/p>\n

What’s a sender?
\nAt the moment, sender reputation is largely tied to the originating address. Not an email address, but the IP address of the computer (server) sending out the emails. An IP address identifies a point of connection to the Internet.<\/p>\n

Large email marketing services will have a range of IP addresses they use to send out their customers’ email. In some cases, each customer has a unique IP address reserved for their use only. In other cases, email from several customers will share a sending IP address.<\/p>\n

How is reputation measured?
\nNot all anti-spam technologies or email services use the same criteria to measure reputation or give the same weight to each criterion. But there are some measures widely accepted as important for your sender reputation.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0Spam complaints<\/b><\/p>\n

If your emails provoke an unusually high number of\u00a0spam complaints<\/a>, then this hurts your reputation.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0Bad addresses<\/b><\/p>\n

A good sender keeps a list “clean.” This means you don’t send messages to\u00a0spam traps<\/a>\u00a0or to any email addresses that don’t exist or accept email anymore.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0Volume<\/b><\/p>\n

A consistent, high volume of email is seen as a positive. Sudden, large spikes in the amount of email you send are often taken as a sign of spamming activity.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0Permanence<\/b><\/p>\n

The longer you’ve been sending from the same IP address, the better your reputation. “New” senders are viewed with initial skepticism until they prove themselves.<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0Infrastructure<\/b><\/p>\n

Your sending infrastructure needs to comply with accepted technical standards.<\/p>\n

How can you improve your reputation?
\nImproving your sender reputation means making long-term improvements in all aspects of your email program. But important tactics are:<\/p>\n

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<\/a>Email certification and whitelists<\/td>\ntop \u21d1<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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The organizations that process incoming email spend a lot of time and energy trying to decide if the sender is a “good” or “bad” sender and whether the email should be blocked, delivered to the inbox or sent to a junk folder.<\/p>\n

The task would be much easier if these organizations could fast track some emails through the system because the sender has a positive and reliable track record.<\/p>\n

If they know the sender follows a set of recommended standards and practices, then they needn’t expose the sender’s emails to so much scrutiny.<\/p>\n

This concept underpins the idea of a whitelist, which is simply a list of “approved” email senders. Messages from whitelisted senders get preferential treatment and are more likely to be delivered to the subscriber’s inbox.<\/p>\n

Large ISPs and webmail services may each have one or more of their own whitelists. They may build them automatically, using their own data to decide when a particular sender deserves a listing. Or they may oblige senders to apply for whitelisting and provide evidence of compliance with the list’s required standards.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, there is no global whitelist that gets you preferential delivery treatment at a multitude of ISPs, webmail services or corporations. Whitelists are also losing importance as a delivery tool as ISPs etc. focus more on other tactics like sender reputation.<\/p>\n

A growing “whitelisting” alternative, though, is\u00a0email certification<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is where a third-party agency audits your email marketing program to see if you comply with a set of required standards. If you do, then they certify this program.<\/p>\n

As such, certification is not a quick fix for those who are having delivery problems. You cannot get certified unless you are following strict best practices with regard to permission, list management etc.<\/p>\n

Email certification agencies have agreements with large ISPs and webmail services to give their accredited senders special treatment.<\/p>\n

Depending on the certification and the ISP\/webmail service concerned, such special treatment might include:<\/p>\n