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Email Delivery & IP Reputation

By Heather Seitz in Featured

Deliverability all starts with reputation! And we’re talking, specifically, about the reputation of your IP address. This is the IP address from which your emails are being sent. This is not necessarily the IP address of your domain/website.

Reputation is kind of like your credit score! There are a number of factors that go into making up the score such as spam complaints, unknown email addresses, etc. Each has a different “weight” so to speak – just like the factors on your credit report.

Likewise, it takes some time to build a good reputation just as it takes some time to build up your credit.

And just as there are a number of different entities that “report” to the credit agencies, your IP reputation is the sum of several factors as well.

These include:

- The ISPs themselves

- The “Anti-spam” community

- Subscriber feedback (and interaction)

Let’s take a look at each of these components:

The ISPs (Internet Service Providers)

The ISPs are looking at things such as authentication measures, ISP spam traps, user spam complaints, DNS information, list maintenance, and even links (URLs) in the email messages themselves.

NOTE: We’re referring to items at the ISP level at this point, and not 3rd party providers of data.

These factors determine not only whether your emails will be blocked (rejected) entirely, but also whether they end up in the inbox. In other words, the ISPs may accept your message into their system, but filter it into their users’ spam folder.

Keep in mind that the ISPs are always testing new things and it ultimately comes down to their subscribers’ feedback so don’t get too worried if your emails temporarily end up in the spam folder IF you’re doing everything correctly!

TIP: On the first email you send to your subscribers after they opt-in, include instructions for them to whitelist your “from” email address.

The Anti-Spam Community

Next, we need to look at the anti-spam community.

This refers to both spam complaints AND spam traps.

The thing that’s important to realize is that there are dozens, if not hundreds – even thousands, of “lists” out there! But there are only a handful of reputable services that significantly impact your deliverability.

The main ones that you need to pay attention to are SpamCop and SpamHaus.

Basically, customers of the service simply forward objectionable emails as attachments to a customized reporting address. The service does a number of checks on the message and ultimately reports it to the ISPs.

These complaints are NOT the same as a subscriber hitting the “spam” button in their email client.

Subscriber Complaints

The next factor is your subscriber complaint rate. It doesn’t matter if you using single or double opt-in for your mailing list when it comes to subscriber complaints.

Even if someone has confirmed their opt-in, they can still click the spam button and adversely affect you. The ISP has no way of knowing if they opted in at all, let alone single opted in or double opted in.

One of the bigger problems when it comes to delivery problems is that the spam complaint rate is too high. Different ISPs have different acceptable rates. The bottom line is that you want this number to be as low as possible. The acceptable rate varies with different ISPs, email providers, and hosting companies (if you’re using a self hosted email solution).

It is best to treat these complaints as unsubscribe requests and remove these subscribers from your list.

TIP: Use a one-click unsubscribe process to make it easy for people to get off of your list. If you make the process too complex, you’ll increase the rate at which people simply click the “report as spam” button (or equivalent in the subscriber’s email client).

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IP Reputation is one of many factors that affects your inbox deliverability. Download your free whitepaper entitled: “Get Your Email to the Inbox” Today at http://www.EmailDelivered.com/reports/email-reputation.

Introducing Gmail Priority InBox – Email that Sorts Itself

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

We all hate email overload. Web-based email programs like Gmail have built-in smart spam filtering and advanced labelling, but you can still miss important emails if you receive hundreds per day.

In an attempt to solve this problem, Gmail software engineers have today launched the Priority InBox.

Basically, this is an advanced sorting tool for your incoming mail. Your new Gmail InBox will be divided into three sections: Priority InBox (unread), Starred Emails and Everything Else. Based on a variety of signals about the importance of an email, Gmail will flag it and move it to the top section of your InBox, giving it priority over all other mail.

For example, if you are in daily email contact with a person, Gmail will determine that emails from that person are important and should always arrive in your Priority InBox.

You can also manually promote or demote emails to/from your Priority InBox by using the “+” and “-” buttons provided. You can use filtering to control your Priority InBox and you can customize the three InBox sections to suit your needs.

The longer you use Gmail, the smarter the Priority InBox gets at sorting your mail. From the official blog post:

“Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important ‘bologna’, or ‘bacn’. So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.”

In a side note, news of Priority InBox was leaked early, despite a strict media embargo that was meant to be in place until this evening. Maybe it’s just me, but a media embargo seem ridiculous in the age of social and real time search. A media embargo from Google, the foremost advocates of social and real time search just seems ludicrous. But anyway, I digress.

While internal Google staff and some BETA testers have been trialling Priority InBox for some months, the feature will begin rolling out to all Gmail and Google Apps users over the next week or so. You’ll know if you have the new feature if you see the “New! Priority Inbox” link in the top right corner of your Gmail account.

Stop Sabotaging Your Email Marketing – Email Deliverability Explained

By Tariq Ahmad in Featured

Email deliverability is a term that encompasses all the issues involved with getting your permission based emails to land in your subscriber’s inbox.   Improving deliverability involves actions that can be taken on behalf of email marketers to ensure that emails are delivered to the recipients that signed up to receive them.   The success of your email marketing campaign hinges on your ability to ensure that these mailings land in your subscribers inbox.  The ability to deliver a mailing in a subscribers inbox is almost entirely dependent on how ISPs calculate your Sender Reputation.  How they calculate your sender reputation score determines whether your mailing is received in the inbox, the junk mail folder, or even delivered at all.

Sender reputation is associated with the IP address of the mail server you are using to send messages from. ISPs score a sender’s reputation by giving different weight to various factors related to email marketing activity and then use some type of equation to determine your reputation.  In essence, your sender reputation indicates to ISP the trustworthiness of the source of the email that is being delivered.  What constitutes a trustworthy source will vary from ISP to ISP so in order to build a strong sender reputation you will need to familiarize yourself with all of the factors that ISPs look at when determining a score.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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