We started the month with some conversations about best practices, both generally looking at the sort of best practices people follow (or don’t) as well as some specific practices we wanted to look at in more depth. Three for this month: Be gracious with opt-out requests. Email marketing is hard. Even when it’s successful, response rates can be very low. It is surely frustrating to hear from...
“We follow all the best practices!” is a common refrain from many senders. But what does best practices really mean? To me the bulk of best practices are related to permission, technical setup and identity. Send opt-in mail. Follow the SMTP spec. Authenticate your mail with DKIM. Publish a SPF record. Don’t hide you domain whois behind privacy protection services. Honor...
I’ve been seeing reports over the last few days about an increase in bounces at Yahoo. Reliable people are telling me they’re seeing some increase in “invalid user” bounces. You may remember Yahoo announced an overhaul of their mail product back in December. Reliable sources tell me that this is more than just interface revamp. In the back end, Yahoo! is removing older...
This week’s Wednesday question comes from D. What are your thoughts on bounce handling There’s no specific standard for bounce handling as we often talk about it. While a lot of people will mention the RFCs, the RFCs only say what to do with a single email that gets a 4xy or a 5xy during the SMTP transaction. If the message gets a 5xy during the SMTP transaction, then the email MUST...
In the email delivery space there are a lot of numbers we talk about including bounce rates, complaint rates, acceptance rates and inbox delivery rates. These are all good numbers to tell us about a particular campaign or mailing list. Usually these metrics all track together. Low bounce rates and low complaint rates correlate with high delivery rates and high inbox placement. But sometimes the...
I am a strong believer that bounce handling should be designed to remove addresses that have no human on the other end while not removing addresses that have a real recipient on the other end. Bounce handling should be designed to appropriately manage your subscriber base. Delivery problems are the consequence if you don’t do that. They shouldn’t be the reason you bounce handle...
James from Cloudmark has his own insight on spamtraps.
Return Path released their global delivery report for the second half of 2009. To put together the report, they look at mail delivery to the Mailbox Monitor accounts at 131 different ISPs for 600,000+ sends. In the US, 20% of the email sent by Mailbox Monitor customers to Return Path seed accounts doesn’t make it to the inbox. In fact, 16% of the email just disappears. I’ve blogged in...
A couple clients recently have had bounces from different places indicating that their mails were caught by the recipients’ anti-virus filter. These are some of my better clients sending out daily newsletters. They’ve been mailing for years and I know that they are not phishing. They asked me to investigate the bounce messages. The information I had to work with was minimal. One...
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...
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