We all know that receiving ISPs rate limit incoming email. With the volumes of mail that they’re currently dealing with they must do that in order to keep their servers from falling over. A client was dealing with rate limits recently. These were not typical rate limits, in that the recipient ISP was 4xxing mail. Instead, the recipient ISP was not accepting any incoming connections. The...
Many of us are so used to email appearing instantaneous, we forget that the underlying protocol was never designed for instant messaging. When the SMTP protocol was originally proposed it was designed to support servers that may have had intermittent connectivity. The protocol allowed for email to be spooled to disk and then sent when resources were available. In fact, almost everyone who was...
(Image from Bad Astronomy) Almost every delivery consultant, delivery expert or deliverability blog offers their secrets to understanding spam filters. As a reader, though, how do you know if the author knows what they’re talking about? For instance, on one of the major delivery blogs had an article today saying that emails with a specific subject line will not get past spam filters. This...
What is your policy for handling soft bounces? What do you consider a soft bounce? What is the right thing to do about soft bounces? The first step in talking about soft bounces is to define them. When I talk about soft bounces, I mean mail that has been rejected with a 4xx response during the SMTP transaction. As described by RFC5321, when a recipient MTA responds with a 4xx it is telling the...
Put any group of senders together and the conversation invariably turns to discussions of how to get email delivered to the Inbox. There is an underlying flavor to most of these conversations that is quite sad. Many senders seem to believe that the delivery of their email is outside of their control and that since the ISPs are difficult to reach that senders are stuck. The ennui is palpable. I am...
Last week I commented on negative branding in email. One of the comments on that post was an advertisement for a company called WrapMail. In the course of attempting to determine if this was spam or a real comment, I checked out their website. While the comment itself may not be spam, and it may not be providing services to spammers, the entire business model strikes me as a delivery nightmare...
Bronto blog has step by step directions on how to run a successful re-engagement campaign.
A lot of senders seem to think that the secret to good delivery is having personal contacts at the ISPs. That way, when there is a delivery problem you can call up your friend at the ISP and inform them that they have made a mistake. In this little sender fantasy world, the ISP rep then apologizes profusely, unblocks the sender’s mail and perform magic to prevent a block from ever happening...
Yesterday I talked about breaking through the script in order to escalate an issue. I briefly mentioned that I always start out following the script and using the channels ISPs have provided. There are a number of reasons to do this all of which benefit you, the sender. First off, when you use the designated communication pathway at an ISP there is a record of your contact. There are procedures...
In handling day to day issues I use the ISP designated channels. This means I frequently get dragged into long conversations with people, probably outsourced to the far east, who can do nothing beyond send me a boilerplate. This can be a frustrating experience when the issue you’re trying to deal with is not handled by the script. Generally, by the time someone has come to me for help, they...
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