Best Practices that Improve E-Mail Deliverability (Part 3)
Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Editor-in-Chief,
Web Marketing Today, Rocklin, CA
Sep 4, 2007, 01:48
In part 1 and part 2 of this series we've discussed a number of ways to improve the inbox delivery of your e-mails. Here are some more important approaches:
8. Monitor Blacklist Reports
Every e-mailer will eventually be accused of spamming and appear on a blacklist, a list of supposed spammers, when an irate recipient complains that you are spamming -- whether you actually are or not. Of course, you want to make sure your Email Service Provider (ESP) isn't on a blacklist (unlikely), but it's vital that you try to get off any blacklists that your domain name may appear on, especially the blacklists routinely used by the larger ISPs. You can check your status by using the free MX Toolbox (www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx) or by subscribing to a monitoring service, such as Blacklist Monitor (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/blacklist.htm) that e-mails you whenever your domain appears on or is removed from a blacklist. The most frustrating task is to find a way to contact a blacklist administrator so he will remove your domain his particular list. Blacklist Monitor comes with current instructions to get delisted, but blacklist administrators are notoriously difficult to reach. Good luck. This is one reason you may need a good ESP to go to bat for you.
9. Employ SPF and DomainKeys
Too often, spammers will insert your e-mail addresses in the "from" field, pretending that their e-mail is from you, in order to trick the ISPs. As a result are now ISPs beginning to employ methods to determine whether a particular e-mail is sent by a legitimate sender from your domain or by a spammer spoofing your domain with a bogus "from" address.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework, www.openspf.org) was created in 2003 to prevent spoofing of your e-mail address. The ISP checks a line in your domain information to determine whether the sender is authorized by you to e-mail using your domain name. SPF is quite technical. Ask your ESP for the exact SPF entry that indicates that they are authorized to send your bulk e-mails. There is an SPF Setup Wizard (old.openspf.org/wizard.html) that can provide some help, but you'll probably need to ask your web hosting service to insert the proper line in the DNS (Domain Name Service) information for your domain.
DomainKeys is a newer approach that includes an encoded digital signature in the e-mail message. This allows the ISP to verify whether or not the e-mail originated from the purported domain. Hopefully, your ESP will have implemented this, since increasingly the major ISPs are equipped to check DomainKey signatures.
ISPs will often route bulk mail correctly to a recipient's inbox without proper SPF records and DomainKeys. But bulk e-mails from domains that do follow these protocols are significantly more likely to pass through the spam filters unscathed.
10. Respond to Challenge-Response Requests
Some popular spam filters use a challenge-response approach, such as Spam Arrest, EarthLink, and others. An whiny e-mail comes back: "I don't want to receive spam. So if you want to e-mail me, you'll need to click on a link and type in a code before I'll get your e-mail." This creates a chore for legitimate bulk e-mailers, since the first time you send an e-mail to a particular recipient, the system requires a human being to read and type in a CAPTCHA graphic before forwarding the e-mail to the recipient. However, since millions of e-mail recipients now employ such techniques, it's vital that you check your e-mail bounces after a bulk mailing and respond promptly to each of the e-mails requesting your response.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Dr. Wilson is an Internet marketing pioneer and author of more than a dozen books and reports, including The E-Mail Marketing Handbook (2005) and Planning Your Internet Marketing Strategy (Wiley, 2001). He is the founding editor of Web Marketing Today.
