Tag Archives ⇒ email address

List Building – Spam Scoring

· Brandon Hann

Nowadays, spam is so prevalent on the Internet–it’s everywhere. And just as soon as you think you’ve escaped it for good, you get more spam. Even after you deleted your old email address and created a new one, you start getting spam within the first week. It’s a wonder that people even still use email anymore.

Anyway, spam scoring is a feature that email servers use to “hopefully” capture spam and either delete it or place it in a separate folder. The scoring rules vary from service to service, but one of the most common spam blocking services out there is SpamAssassin. Depending on where your users get their mail, your messages may or may not have issues getting to them.

The score

All emails that pass through a SpamAssassin filter are scored from 0-10 after being subjected to a laundry list of checks. To see the full (and very confusing) list of rules, go to the SpamAssassin website. Generally, an email with a score of 5 or lower will get passed the filter and hit the user’s inbox.

Your goal is to test your messages before you send them out because even though someone has legitimately signed up to receive your emails, your messages can still be blocked.

Email tips

There’s a huge list of tips on the SpamAssassin website as well, but here’s a brief idea of how you can prevent your emails from being marked as spam:

  • Don’t use strange characters like replacing o’s with 0’s or writing the work LOOK as L@@K
  • Don’t put invisible text inside HTML messages
  • If using HTML emails, don’t included blank tags
  • Keep your emails on topic or at least focused if you have multiple topics

Testing

If you have a third party managing your email list(s), you can run tests within your account for all of the messages you wish to send. If you’re doing all this manually, you may want to send some emails to yourself provided that you have SpamAssassin enabled on your email server.

Imagine the huge waste of time you’ll experience if you have 100 users on your list, but your email becomes blocked from 99 of them!

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List Building – Delivery Rates

· Brandon Hann

Here’s a little underestimated topic–the deliverability of your email campaign. It’s a wonder that some people pay little attention or no attention to this at all. Maybe it’s one of those “out of sight, out of mind” things, but it really shouldn’t be. Imagine if you sent out a message or newsletter to 100 email address and it only reached 75% of them? You now have 25 people not getting your message.

So what keeps 25 valid email addresses from receiving your message? SPAM filters are the number one reason. Another would be IP address blacklisting. It could even be whether you’re sending attachments with your email. Of course, if you have a list with some invalid email addresses, that’s a whole other issue! Let’s breakdown some of these email issues:

Invalid email addresses

List pruning is an important task and should be done periodically to ensure that you’re not sending emails to people who don’t want it, making sure that you’re not using excessive system resources and also to keep an updated count of your active list.

Better yet, let the users prune themselves! If you’re users signed up one month, but lost interest the next, they would be happy to know that you don’t have them jumping through hoops to try and get their email address off your list. This is one less thing to worry about if you’re using an email provider such as Aweber because they follow anti-spam laws to a “T”, therefore all of your messages will provide instructions on how users can unsubscribe.

SPAM filters

A lot of people have spam filters, but some may not even know they’re there and some might not have control over what comes in. The point here is not to force your users to try and find out ways to sneak your emails past the guards, but to ensure your emails are designed properly so they can get to the inbox without trouble. Have you ever been to a website that tells you how to subscribe to their newsletter and then somewhere on the same page, they tell you that before you can get anything, you need to make sure such-and-such email address in on your whitelist?

How often do you continue with that subscription and do you even remember to add the right email address? Don’t put this type of stuff in your user’s hands. They want access to your information and they want it fast and easy. The moment you let this fact out of your head is the moment you lose readers.

IP address blacklisting

If you’re not using an email service provider, you’re likely sending emails from your own system(s). Be careful as some ISPs and webhosts don’t allow the sending of mass emails over their networks. This can cause your IP address to be banned on certain ports or worse, you can be placed on worldwide spam lists. To check your IP address, you can visit some (or all) of these blacklists:

More information on how to remove an IP from these lists can be found on each page.

Attachments

Don’t send people attachments if you can help it! Even if they’ve purchased or requested something downloadable, don’t attach it. Make it accessible to download from your server and then link to it in your email. Attachments don’t always make it on the other site. Some users have automatic attachment removals, some send all emails with attachments to the trash and sometimes attachments can get corrupted.

So, unless you’re communicating with someone one-on-one, try not to attach any files.

Frequency

One sure way to increase delivery rates is to let your readers know when to expect your email(s). This way they can look for it and if it did happen to end up in the spam folder, they can make adjustments on their own to ensure that won’t happen again.

Also, by telling a user when they should expect your mailings, they can get a better idea of the “value” in signing up for your mailing list.

Following the tips above will guarantee that your messages are delivered on-time and to the right people.

<< Back to Bounce Handling Forward to Support Time to Response >>

List Building – Bounce Handling

· Brandon Hann

If you send an email to someone based on an email address they gave you some time ago, but this time you receive a bounce-back message, it’s usually because that person has changed their email address or their inbox is full. When you’re running a business and a successful mailing list, you don’t want to have bounced emails.

Some mail servers are configured to delete all bounced mail automatically, but you don’t want to do that. In fact, you want to know about every bounced email your system gets because this gives you an opportunity to rectify the situation. In most cases, there’s nothing much you can do. If someone changed their email address and didn’t provide you with the new one, all you can do is prune your list accordingly.

However, this is exactly what you want to do. You don’t want to maintain a working email list with hundreds of dead emails in there because all you end up doing is wasting valuable system resources.

Bounce handling

If you’re using a proper email provider, bounce handling will usually be handled automatically, but if it’s not, it’s important to check your email lists for email address that are no longer valid or accepting your email. If you don’t, you can be marked as a spammer and this is not good.

Being labeled a spammer will not only tarnish your professional and/or personal image, but you can affect your webhost, ISP and email service provider!

<< Back to Email Service Provider (ESP) Forward to Delivery Rates >>

Site Creation – Email

· Brandon Hann

We obviously know what email is, so this one’s going to be short. However, it’s how you use it that makes the difference. The difference between your company looking professional and looking like a fly-by-night operation. How many times have you seen an advertisement, sticker on a car or a business card that had a company name followed by an email address from hotmail.com or yahoo.com?

How much better would it look to have an email address from your company’s domain name? As an example, if you changed your email address from YourName001293@hotmail.com to YourName@YourCompany.com you just took your image to a whole new level.

If you’ve been using an email address from a free web service, you need to change it now. And if you’re stuck on the idea that you can check your email anywhere there’s an Internet connection, you no longer have to worry with a service called IMAP. Let’s take a look at some differences in email services.

Types of email services

  • POP3 – POP email is the most basic of email services that allows you to simply download your messages to a third party software program such as Outlook, Entourage or Thunderbird. This is a great advantage given the fact that your email is stored on your computer, but this can also be the downside because if you’re not around your computer, you won’t have access to it. The major drawback, however is that if have more than one computer and you download your email on one computer, you won’t have access to it on another.
  • IMAP – IMAP allows you to use your third party software to map it to your email account(s) on the server. This means that all your emails are synced between your software and your server. You still need your computer and an Internet connection, but unlike POP3, your email isn’t moved from the server and therefore can be accessed on multiple computers that contain your mail settings. One drawback with IMAP is that your email always stays on the server until it’s deleted, which can fill up any storage quota you may have.
  • Webmail – All web hosting plans and services you can buy come with free webmail services. This is the best choice for getting your email if you like the idea of being able to access email truly anywhere. This service works exactly like Hotmail or Yahoo!, but it may be limited in features. One of the only drawbacks with webmail would be storage limits. You can also use webmail and IMAP together since any changes you make on one or the other will affect both.

When running a business, you always want to be in contact with your customers. If you have to, get yourself a smartphone so your messages can come is as soon as they’re sent. After choosing your preferred way to get email, stick with it as you don’t want to become confused later or have email stored in more than one location.

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