Did You Know, Legitimate Emails Will Be Blocked

As an email user you probably noticed the increased amount of SPAM you seem to be
receiving.  As an email marketer you do not want your messages to be perceived as part of this increasing amount of SPAM.

Most ISP’s in either case recognizes that SPAM is an ever-growing issue. Therefore, most ISPs in response, have changed their email systems to block spammy emails from reaching their customers mailboxes.

 

However, the numbers are against us all.

 

Not only do ISP’s find it impossible to block 100% of incoming SPAM to their mail servers,
they find it’s virtually impossible to block even 50% of email spam received from
their customers in boxes.  And what’s worse for email marketers, because of false positives read by the ISP’s spam filters, legitimate emails will be blocked too.

 

The email system as we all know it has no real delivery protocol - There is no guarantee that an email sent will be delivered to the intended in-box   We all believe that an email was delivered to the proper recipient when it’s sent, unless we receive an “undeliverable”
bounce back message.  However, in the real world when a big ISP blocks an email from being delivered they may not return an “undeliverable” message to the sender.
They aren’t under any obligation to do so besides it may be a matter of economics.

 

Putting economics aside sometimes you find, as an email marketer or discussion list member, you just can’t send messages to a certain domain, but you can send messages to everyone else.  There’re actually technical nuances that may prevent your email from sending to a certain domain (email address).  The issues can include:

• Blocked IP Address (the domain is on a SPAM list)
• Missing
• DNS records
• Misconfigured
• DNS

The ISP filtered your email as SPAM, it went missing in the blackhole of filters.

 

And as stated not all ISPs send back a “undeliverable” bounce back message. SPAM filtering processes for big ISPs, such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and so forth, are set up
to handle traffic created by billions of email messages.  To cut down on bandwidth and annoyance they try to set up strict spam filtering rules, which includes filtering out good emails too, so what’s an email marketer to do?

 

Ask your ESP (email service provider) for a private IP address.  Most likely you are hosted on a shared IP address, which increases your chance of being blacklisted if someone on that IP is earmarked as a spammer.

 

Does your ESP have reverse DNS for their MX records?  I can’t imagine an ESP without this, but stuff happens.  This is actually required by RFC 1912, Common
DNS Operational and Configuration Errors.

  

Is your SPF record correct?  https://support.dnsimple.com/articles/spf-record/ 

 

• And then there’s the more common email delivery issues. 
• Unknown User – the account maybe closed, or the name may be misspelled 
• Unknown Host – the host name (domain) is not correct or doesn’t’ exist.
• Delay in delivery – the mail server may be down or it may be a setting in your email program
• Blocked IP Address – You’re on a Blacklist

  

There are always Best Practices for all situations, keeping email out of the spam
folder and through the spam firewall is as follows:

 

• Keep
  your sender reputation high. https://mailinglistservices.com/are-you-managing-your-sender-reputation/ 

• Don’t
  buy or rent email addresses:  https://mailinglistservices.com/worse-email-practices-for-list-management/  

• Use all the sending tools: DKIM and SPF to authenticate your emails. 

• Be consistent with your From Address:  https://mailinglistservices.com/can-you-really-trust-a-noreply____-com-address/ 

• Send what your say you will send, content is important. https://mailinglistservices.com/email-marketing-content-that-begs-to-be-read/
  

•  Keep your email list up to date. Remove bad addresses.

Need help with your email list?  Tell us your issue and we will find you a
solution.