1995
This page and all contents Copyright 1995 -
© List Media, Inc., Chagrin Falls, Ohio USA.
List Media, AdSocial, & AD are registered trademarks of List Media, Inc.
You want your recipients to read your emails, find them valuable, and not label them as spam. In other words, you want to maximize email deliverability and the percentage of your emails that arrive in your recipients’ inboxes. Admail offers over twenty years of email delivery experience—not Amazon, SendGrid or any other ESP can provide the necessary expertise that gets your emails delivered. This topic will review email deliverability concepts that you need to be familiar with when you use Admail.
To maximize email deliverability, you need to understand email delivery issues, proactively take steps to prevent them, stay informed of the status of the emails that you send, and then improve your email-sending program to increase the likelihood of successful deliveries. The following sections review the concepts behind these steps and how Admail helps you through the process.
In most cases, your messages are delivered successfully to recipients who expect them. In some cases, however, a delivery might fail, or a recipient might not want to receive the mail that you are sending. Bounces, complaints, and the suppression list are related to these delivery issues and are described in the following sections.
If your recipient’s receiver (for example, an ISP) fails to deliver your message to the recipient, the receiver bounces the message back to Admail. Admail then notifies you of the bounced email through Admail AccuTrak and automatically determines if it is a hard bounce or a soft bounce.
There are hard bounces and soft bounces, as follows:
Hard bounce – A persistent email delivery failure. For example, the mailbox does not exist. Admail does not retry hard bounces, with the exception of DNS lookup failures. We strongly recommend that you do not make repeated delivery attempts to email addresses that hard bounce. Allowing AccuTrak to handle this automatically prevents retries of non-deliverable email.
Soft bounce – A temporary email delivery failure. For example, the mailbox is full, there are too many connections (also called throttling), or the connection times out. Admail retries soft bounces up to four times. If the email still cannot be delivered after four campaigns, then Admail stops retrying it and flags it a Hard bounce.
Admail AccuTrak identifies hard bounces and soft bounces that will no longer be retried and are reported as Non-Deliverables. Bounces can also be synchronous or asynchronous. A synchronous bounce occurs while the email servers of the sender and receiver are actively communicating. An asynchronous bounce occurs when a receiver initially accepts an email message for delivery and then subsequently fails to deliver it to the recipient.
Most email client programs provide a button labeled “Mark as Spam,” or similar, which moves the message to a spam folder, and forwards it to the ISP. Additionally, most ISPs maintain an abuse address (e.g., abuse@example.net), where users can forward unwanted email messages and request that the ISP take action to prevent them. In both of these cases, the recipient is making a complaint. If the ISP concludes that you are a spammer, and Admail has a feedback loop set up with the ISP, then the ISP will send the complaint back to Admail. When Admail receives such a complaint, it removes the complainant’s email reducing the potential risk of account termination for an AUP violation. It is recommended and prohibited to make repeated delivery attempts to email addresses that generate complaints as this will further harm the reputation of the IP.
##Suppression List The Admail suppression list is a list of recipient email addresses that have recently caused an AUP violation for any Admail customer. If you try to upload an email through Admail to an address that is on the suppression list, Admail treats the email as an unsubscribe instead of attempting to send it. An unsubscribed email address will remain on your list preventing future delivery attempts. If you are sure that the email address that you’re trying to send to is valid, you can submit a reactivation request to support@admail.net or use the List Member Send Reactivation Email function.
One of the biggest issues with email on the Internet is unsolicited bulk email or spam. ISPs take considerable measures to prevent their customers from receiving spam. Correspondingly, Admail takes proactive steps to decrease the likelihood that ISPs consider your email to be spam. Admail uses verification, authentication, and sending limits. Admail also maintains a trusted reputation with ISPs and requires you to send high-quality email. Admail provides most of this configuration for you automatically; in other cases, it provides the tools (like recommended verification services), custom configuration (i.e. Vanity Domain or custom DNS), or guides you in the right direction (sending limits). The following sections provide more information about each concept.
To maintain trust between ISPs and Admail.net TOS—Admail needs to ensure that its senders are who they say they are.
Unfortunately, it’s possible for a spammer to create and falsify their account information when creating an Admail; therefore, Admail has taken extensive measure to ensure only legitimate organization can actually send emails.
You may be required to verify email addresses deliverability which you intend to send through Admail. Their are two services acceptable NeverBounce and SiftLogic. You can verify email addresses by using either of these services.
Not to be confused with verification your data can only be hygiened by Admail. If concerns arise that your list has been compromised with Moles, SPAM trap or Honeypots, then you may be required by our Compliance Team to preform further list hygiene. This can be caused by deliberate sabotage by competitors or abandon domains. This also why we discourage purchasing a list from any third parties that are unable to provide verification of consent. For more information contact sales@admail.net; to read more about SPAM list providers visit our FAQ page and our spam article.
Authentication is another way that you can indicate to ISPs that you are who you say you are. When you authenticate an email, you provide evidence that you are the owner of the account and that your emails have not been modified in transit. In some cases, ISPs refuse to forward email that is not authenticated. Admail supports two methods of authentication: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
If an ISP detects sudden, unexpected spikes in the volume or rate of your emails, the ISP might suspect you are a spammer and block your emails. Therefore, every Admail recommends sending limits to regulate the number of email messages that you send and the rate at which you send them. These sending limits help you to gradually ramp up your sending activity to protect your trustworthiness with ISPs.
Admail has two sending limits: a system-wide limit to prevent unauthorized clients form sending to many emails at onetime, and the second with limits on large campaigns to 100,000 per hour to avoid alarming an ISP of possible SPAM. Admail recommends you send a small amount of emails each day to start if have one of our dedicated IP’s. If the mail that you send is acceptable to ISPs, this limit can be increased gradually. (If you have a one off project that requites sending over 250,000 in day contact sales@admail.net.) Over time, your sending limits can steadily increase so that you can send larger quantities of email at faster rates. If you have specific questions about sending limits contact support@admail.net include the following:
When it comes to email sending, reputation—a measure of confidence that an IP address, email address, or sending domain is not the source of spam—is important. Admail maintains a strong reputation with ISPs so that ISPs deliver your emails to your recipients’ inboxes. Similarly, you need to maintain a trusted reputation with Admail. You build your reputation with Admail by sending high-quality content. When you send high-quality content, your reputation becomes more trusted over time and Admail increases your sending limits. Excessive bounces and complaints negatively impact your reputation and can cause Admail to lower your sending IP level or terminate your Admail account.
If you currently maintain a list with high standards you can apply for our Audited Sender program with a 99.4% delivery to get your quotas increased and moved to our Privileged IP Class to guarantee surrounding IPs have a spotless reputation. One way to help maintain your reputation is to contact the Admail team before you mail with your questions.
High-quality email is email that recipients find valuable and want to receive. When sending and email marketing campaign remember, VALUE means different things to different recipients and can come in the form of offers, order confirmations, receipts, newsletters, etc. Ultimately, your deliverability rests on the quality of the emails that you send because ISPs block emails that they find to be low quality (spam). For more information about how to send high-quality email, see Improving Deliverability with Email Best Practices https://admail.net/category/best-practices/.
Whether your deliveries fail, your recipients complain about your emails, or Admail successfully delivers an email to a recipient’s mail server, Admail helps you to track down the issue by providing notifications and by enabling you to easily monitor your usage statistics.
When an email bounces, the ISP notifies Admail, and Admail notifies you. Admail notifies you of hard bounces and soft bounces that Admail will no longer retry. Many ISPs also forward complaints and Admail has in place complaint feedback loops with the major ISPs so you don’t have to. Admail can notify you of bounces, complaints, and successful deliveries in two ways: you can set your account up to receive notifications through Admails (soon to be released) API, or you can receive notifications by email (bounces and complaints only).
Admail provides customized delivery statistics so that you can view your failed deliveries to determine and resolve the root causes. This is an optional feed which Admail can provide contact sales@admil.net for more information. You can view your delivery statistics by using the Admail console or by requesting a customized feed. You can view how many deliveries, bounces, complaints, and opened emails you have, and you can…
If you are getting large numbers of bounces and complaints, it’s time to reassess your email-sending strategy. Remember that excessive bounces, complaints, and attempts to send low-quality email constitute abuse and put your Admail account at risk of termination. Ultimately, you need to be sure that you use Admail to send high-quality emails and to only send emails to recipients who want to receive them. For more information, see Improving Deliverability with Email Best Practices
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This page and all contents Copyright 1995 -
© List Media, Inc., Chagrin Falls, Ohio USA.
List Media, AdSocial, & AD are registered trademarks of List Media, Inc.