Email can have delivery problems for various reasons. Actually, I’m afraid there are many reasons why mail can bounce. In fact, there are so many ways it could go wrong that sometimes I’m surprised it works. We have a department in this company full of employees who do nothing but work on email delivery. After listening to all the variables that go into a successful send, I always try to change a data purchase to a data rental. Unless you have your own IT staff handling all the little details involved with a successful mailing list, you could run into a lot of problems.
For starters, each and every ISP has different email limits. If you exceed the limit, it will bounce emails going to that ISP. It took us three years to get all the IP limit settings. Once we configured all the limit settings in our mail software, 30% of the bounces we received were eliminated. The “From” address may not match an account on the email server. The ISP may require that the email arrive over a connection (dial-up or DSL) actually provided by the ISP; Sending using someone else’s connection may not be allowed. The ISP may require you to authenticate before sending an email and you haven’t. Our COO created an entirely new position in the industry. He hired an executive to check the email. That’s all he does all day.
When a business sends an email to a list (especially b2b lists), the server that sent the email will receive “verification/authentication emails” that require a human to verify that you are a real human and not a bot or spam source. This is usually caused by software protecting the end user. About 12% of the email we implement needs verification. Instead of losing all those valuable email contacts, we have an executive to do this repetitive task.
A mail server somewhere could be misconfigured. Most likely your email client is misconfigured. Double check your outgoing server or “SMTP” settings and check with your ISP to make sure you’ve set them up correctly. Some bounces will occur because “resources are temporarily unavailable”. or “Out of Memory”, which usually indicates a problem with a mail server over which you probably have no control. They are, in general, temporary and must be resolved over time. You also have to be very careful with content filters. Like blacklists, content filters are an approach that many ISPs now implement to stem the tide of spam for their customers. Most will simply discard email that looks like spam, but some servers will actually send a bounce. Phrases in the bounce message such as “The message appears to be spam”, “keywords rejected by the anti-spam content filter”, “scored too high on the spam scale”, and the like mean that your email, for whatever reason, activated spam filters on the receiving end. . Your email looks too much like spam. We have to send all our ads by mail through our proprietary optimization software.
Our unique software chains thousands of algorithm checkpoints and I also think our algorithm software is unique in that it is predictive. Our predictive algorithm software updates itself every month keeping the algorithms constantly changing. Each ISP has different algorithms that will make it difficult to send successfully. What type of optimization software are you using? There is another form of ISP limits, but unlike ISP limits that bounce too many messages going to AOL or Yahoo, they will start bouncing when too many messages arrive from the same IP. For this reason, our mail software rotates a chain of 20 IPs, even for small volume shipments. How many IPs are you rotating within your mail software? Regardless of how many IPs you’re using, they should all be clean. If you have an IP that is blacklisted, you will have big problems with deliverability. You need to make sure you have reverse DNS setup or 80% of the email you send will bounce.
You can find out if your DNS is configured correctly at the following site: http://www.dnsstuff.com. You can also check your IP status there. As if all of this wasn’t enough, Microsoft-based email servers like Hotmail require you to be a linked sender in order to send any kind of volume to their email addresses. Hotmail has implemented a third party certification solution that gives senders another option to increase their ability to reach Hotmail users. The Bonded Sender program uses sender identification and sender reputation to establish the “legitimacy” of a sender. Mail sent by senders who are enrolled in the Bonded Sender program bypasses most of Hotmail’s anti-spam filters. If you are not a linked sender, you could also remove all Hotmail emails from your list.
Unfortunately, the fees to become a guaranteed sender are steep, and you must pay these fees every year. Are you a linked sender? Similar to a tied shipping program or feedback loops, it is extremely important to be whitelisted with all major ISPs. The process takes a long time and not all ISPs accept it automatically. Which ISP are you whitelisted with? Sometimes a rebound has nothing to do with you. In some cases, your recipient has too much email and your server won’t accept any more. This is most common with web-based email services like Hotmail or Yahoo, which have limits on the amount of mail you can collect.
The other big problem with mail today is the domain keys you are using. What domain keys are you using? Are you using SPF or Sender-ID or Goodmail DK or DKIM or all of the above or others? Another major reason why companies struggle with delivery is the fact that they are not in feedback loops. Once we got into all the feedback loops, our delivery increased dramatically. What feedback loops are you in?
To better understand why email is having delivery issues, answer the following questions.
What are your limit settings for the following ISPs, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Comcast, Version, Roadrunner, Cox, Bellsouth, Juno, Sbcglobal, and Rocketmail? What are the domain keys you are using for the same ISPs? Do you have someone going through the authentication process? Did you double check your mail server settings? Are any of your IPs blacklisted? Are any of your IP addresses whitelisted, and if so, how many? Do you use software to remove algorithms from your ads? What kind of software? How many IPs are you rotating within your mail software? Do you have a reverse dns setup? Do you have any configuration errors in DNSSTUFF? Are you a linked sender? What feedback loops are you in?
