Getting Your Emails Delivered
These days, email marketing is an art form. Spam is a problem everyone, including the likes of hotmail, google, yahoo and others are fighting. So when is comes to email marketing, ensuring that you manage your reputation as a legitimate sender is key!
Email delivery has nothing to do with the email marketing software you use.
IP Reputation
When you send an email, it is not send by your domain but through the IP address your domain/email service resides on. If you are on a shared hosting server, the servers IP and your reputation is shared by many. Also servers that are specifically set to send e-mails generally have Reverse DNS & SPF records, support greylisting, and other features.
If anyone on that server (IP) spams individuals and the IP gets blacklisted by “Spam Cops”, it affects everyone on that IP/server.
You can check your IP reputation here
Forward and Reverse DNS
Every domain resolves to an IP address but make sure your server has proper reverse DNS settings configured. DNS is an important way of establishing identity on the internet. Spammers will often forge domain names or IP addresses to hide where their mail is coming from. To detect these forgeries, ISPs often perform what’s called a reverse DNS lookup on incoming messages.
Example: an incoming message claims to be coming from the 202.186.96.56 IP address, an ISP looks up the domain to see if it resolves to embunweb.com. If it doesn’t, the message may be a forgery — or the sender may just now have the correct DNS entries. The result – email is either rejected or categorized as spam.
If you are unsure about your domain’s DNS setup, you can contact us for consultation
SPF Records
Sender Policy Framework or SPF is a more specific DNS entry that lists which IP addresses are approved to send mail for your domain. It is being used by more & more by the big three (Gmail, Hotmail & Yahoo uses it) and others to detect if a message is spam or not.
To learn more about SPF, or to learn how to make an SPF record for your domain, go to http://spf.pobox.com/ or http://www.openspf.org/.
Greylisting
Greylisting is not quite the same as blacklisting. In fact, it is a very powerful spam prevention method used by mail servers.
Basically, the server receiving your email will “temporarily reject” any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate, the originating server will, after a delay, try again and if sufficient time has elapsed, the email will be accepted. If the mail is from a spammer it will probably not be retried since a spammer goes through thousands of email addresses and typically cannot afford the time delay to retry.
Sending Rates
If you do have 1,000s of legitimate subscribers, it is a good idea to throttle your sending rates (as you can do with our email marketing solutions).
Most important, if you are serious about email marketing in Malaysia or anywhere in the world, make sure you work with people that know the industry and technicalities. Email marketing is not just about a large list and a piece of software. If you have any questions on getting your email marketing campaign a boost, contact us online at any time.
Regards,
Kevin Zahri
Co-founder
EmbunWeb.com / KevinZahri.com
Comments (2)
Great. Now i can say thank you
hey nice post!
It’s so true that many forget all about the entire sender ip bit and roll out massive campaigns only to see it end up in spam boxes.
It’s a real shame when legitimate mail is mixed up with spam rubbish. But that’s where email providers embed a host of filters to weed out such occurrences.
Always be sure to check out your sender score and see if its way down. Up is always great of course!
check out my email marketing software at www[dot]interecm[dot]com
We service a whole list of clients in Malaysia and abroad.