HOW TO: Identify and avoid email marketing bad guys

In the Old West, stage drivers were charged with delivering their passengers and goods safely from Missouri to California. Delivery was fraught with peril at every turn, much like email delivery can be today.

Stagecoach drivers armed themselves to fight off direct attacks, and they adopted tactics and strategies to help them make their deliveries. Such procedures involved understanding their enemies and their methods in order to avoid them altogether.

Like the stage driver from the old west, you can identify and avoid the perils of email message delivery by heeding the following dangers and how to avoid them.

The Dangers

Unprotected server hijack. Before your email even goes out, your SMTP server may be hijacked and used to send out unsolicited bulk email. Within minutes of connecting an unprotected computer to the Internet, it may be ambushed by liars-in-wait. It is greatly important to properly configure your email server.

Other mail server protections include:

• Protecting with a firewall
• Close relaying
• Enabling authentication
• Keeping software updated.

Vigilante injustice. When you start the delivery run there are processes waiting to snag your email message and prevent it from reaching its destination. These blackhole lists have scouted your email sending history and reputation. While meant to punish and halt spammers, many blackhole listings also round up legitimate email marketers.

Blackhole list managers base your email reputation on information collected from people to whom you are sending email messages. If you do not honor unsubscribe requests or take measures to ensure that your email message is not lumped into the junk email account, you are at risk of ending up on a black hole or backlist.

To help keep your server off blacklists, do the following:

• Test your messages frequently to ensure they have no spam characteristics
• Clean your list of failed email addresses
• Honor unsubscribe requests
• Ensure your Domain Name System (DNS) zone files are properly configured.

Disguised addresses. You'll want to be careful how you acquire email addresses, and here's why: Some companies have taken it upon themselves to post easily acquired email addresses online, in the hopes that someone will harvest them and start sending them unsolicited spam. These email address collection sites are known as "honey pots." If you purchase a list, depending on how the addresses were acquired, you may very well be purchasing one or more of these masked emails, and sending them email could tarnish your sender reputation.

In some cases, an email service provider may turn old, unused accounts into a honey pot. These addresses were once valid, but based on owner inactivity, they are deemed to be dead. This actually happened to an old Hotmail account I owned. After about two years, I logged into my account and was inundated with all sorts of unsolicited bulk email.

To avoid these traps:

• Don't harvest email addresses
• Don't purchase harvested email addresses
• Cull old, unresponsive addresses from your list.

Inside jobs. In some cases, delivery problems occur before you even get outside your network. A rouge employee may maliciously take advantage of your list and access to your server. More likely, a careless employee may fail to adequately test the message or incorrectly update information like bounced email or unsubscribe requests.

If you are sending through an ISP's SMTP server, you are almost guaranteed to have limited delivery capabilities due to their restrictions. In general, the bigger the ISP, the more restrictive they are when sending email en masse.

More delivery strategies to avoid the bad guys

Like the cowboys of old, knowing who the bad guys are, how they operate, and taking steps to thwart them are keys to ensuring effective delivery. Here are more strategies for avoiding the bad guys.

Alternate routes – If your ISP is severely limiting or blocking you from sending bulk email messages, you might consider setting up your own SMTP mail server. If you want to avoid putting heavy traffic on your regular email server, you might want to look at mail servers designed for bulk email delivery, like PowerMTA from Port25 Solutions.

Slowing down – There is no hard and fast rule that says you have to send all your bulk email messages at one time. Use the data you collect about your customers to send email in smaller, more targeted batches. These practices will not only help you with delivery issues that may arise with a large send, it will increase your responses because your emails will be more valuable to the recipients.

Arming yourself – Knowledge is the key to ensuring that you are following email best practices. If you can afford it, hire an email marketing expert to manage or oversee your email marketing operations. Keep abreast of changes that may affect delivery of your legitimate bulk email messages.

It is imperative for legitimate email marketers to separate themselves from the bad guys to prevent getting lumped in with them. Knowing what the rules are and following them are not enough. Remember, you are held to an even higher standard: Email marketing best practices. -- Arial Software

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