I’ve seen some mentions recently of ESPs suggesting that if you use your own domain in the From: of mail you send through an ESP then that ESP can’t “do email authentication” properly unless they require you to edit your domains DNS settings. That’s not really so, but there is a kernel of truth in there. The real situation is, unsurprisingly, a bit more complicated...
Whenever we’re working with someone to diagnose some obscure delivery issue one of the things we usually have them try is to “run a transaction by hand”. Being able to do that is a trick that everyone working with email should be able to do. I was drafting a blog post today and wanted to refer to running a transaction by hand and I realized that we hadn’t actually...
Senders with delivery problems ask about “the rules.” “Just tell us what the rules are!” “If the ISPs would just tell us what to do we’d do it!” There is only one rule anyone needs to pay attention to for good mail delivery: Respect the recipient. Not good enough for you? Want more specific rules? OK. The two rules everyone must follow for good mail...
There is a persistent belief among some senders that the technical part of sending email is the most important part of delivery. They think that by tweaking things around the edges, like changing their rate limiting and refining bounce handling, their email will magically end up in the inbox. This is a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for bulk foldering and blocking by the ISPs. Yes...
It used to be that every potential client that called me up to ask me to help them with their delivery issues would tell me they weren’t a spammer. Over the last year or so that’s changed to telling me that they have a good reputation and don’t understand why they’re having delivery problems. This leads me to believe that there is some confusion about what reputation is...
But only the opinion of the recipient counts. So says a blog post on All Spammed Up. I’m sorry, but you don’t get to decide that. And by “you” I mean businesses. Businesses and their marketing departments who look at email as a fast, convenient way to reach a lot of people with their very important messages. Now for the purposes of this discussion I’ll make some definitions clear. I’m not talking...
I recently saw a question from an ESP rep asking if anyone had a personal contact at a particular ISP. The problem was that they had a rejection from the ISP saying: 571 5.7.1 too many recipients this session. The ESP was looking for someone at the ISP in order to ask what the problem was. This is exactly the kind of behaviour that drives ISPs bonkers about senders. The ISP has sent a perfectly...
Permission is always a hot topic in email marketing. Permission is key! the experts tell us. Get permission to send email! the ISPs tell us. Marketers have responded by setting up processes to “get” permission from recipients before adding them to mailing lists. They point to their privacy polices and signup forms and say “Look! the recipient gave us permission.” In many...
Stephanie at Return Path has a great blog post on permission and how permission is an ongoing process not a one time thing. There were a couple statements that really grabbed my attention.
What really matters is not that permission was granted, but that it is earned, every time a message is sent […]
Permission requires a strong value proposition.
Over the years I’ve picked up a lot of useful and relevant information about email delivery. I’ve shared a lot of information here on the blog, and while that’s great, a blog is not a great format for a reference. The ISP information page was an initial pass at creating a reference. I realized that just linking to the ISP provided information didn’t communicate very much...
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