More and more I’m moving away from consulting on technical setup issues as the solution to delivery problems. Delivery is not about the technical perfection of a message. Spammers get the technical right all the time. No, instead, delivery is about sending messages the user wants. While looking for something on the blog I found an old post from 2011 that’s still relevant today. In...
One of the things we do for just about every new client coming into WttW is have them send us an email from their bulk mail system. We then check it for technical correctness. This includes things like reviewing all the different From headers, rDNS of the connecting IP, List-Unsubscribe headers and authentication. This is always useful, IMO, because we often find things that were right when they...
Email is a “store and forward” protocol. The sender doesn’t connect directly to the recipient to send the mail with just one network hop, rather the sender connects to a mailserver (usually referred to as an “MTA”, short for Mail Transfer Agent) and sends the message there. Once that MTA has received the message it sends it on to another MTA, and so on until it...
A few months ago, I got spammed by a major brand. I know their ESP takes abuse seriously, so I sent a note into their abuse desk. It bounced with a 550 user unknown. I sent another note into a different abuse address, it bounced. I sent mail into their corporate HQ, it disappeared into a black hole. I eventually connected with their delivery person and he’d not seen hide nor hair of any...
Email is a fluid and ever changing landscape of things to do and not do. Over the years my clients have frequently asked me to look at their technical setup and make sure that how they send mail complies with best practices. Previously, this was a good way to improve delivery. Spamware was pretty sloppy and blocking for somewhat minor technical problems was a great way to block a lot of spam...
A week ago you signed up for your mailing list using a virgin email address. (You didn’t? Maybe you should do that today – there’s no time like Thursday for a quick sanity check!) Check the mailbox for the account you signed up Is the mail you signed up for in the inbox? In the bulk folder? If it’s in the bulk folder, that’s something to look at – all the...
… if your company runs any sort of email marketing, anyway. Right now is the best time to do a mini-audit of your mail campaign. It’ll just take ten minutes, and if you put off doing it until tomorrow it’ll probably never get done. Go to your public-facing company home page. Does it have a link to your privacy policy? Does it have a link to where you can sign up for mailing...
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