Understanding the Email Service Provider "Relationships"

I recently read a blog post titled “Selecting An ESP With Good ISP Relationships” the title may lead some to be mis-lead by what the author truely meant. From the title it sounds like a select few email service providers and marketers have a magic “bat phone” line through which they simply call recipient email services(ISP's)such as Hotmail or YAHOO to solve delivery problems. They call their magic number and then they are back to sending to the inbox. Although there are rare instances when a phone call might help solve a problem with an ISP, this would be an exception far more than the rule.

Sending email servers who get in trouble with recipient ISP's with enough regularity to require a phone call are simply neglecting the rules of the ISP's to such a large degree that they will not likely have the ability to simply place a phone call and get turned back on to send their messages through to their recipient lists.

THE MOST IMPORTANT relationships you have is between your email infrastructure, your reputation, and those of the ISP's. If your sending email systems are not setup properly and abuse the policies of the recipient email providers and those of the intended email recipients, you'll be on the phone a lot. If your systems are secure and setup properly, and you follow simple guidelines to keep your reputation clean you'll almost never need the telephone. A good relationship with the recipient email crowd is based almost exclusively on proper email system infrastructure setup, keeping bounces rare, reducing complaints, avoiding spam traps and a dozen other very simple factors. Sadly, these factors are missed by many senders, even if only in small part, one mistake and delivery stops. See this telling article by marketing Sherpa, “Behind The Scenes at Email Service Providers.”

An excellent article by Ken Magill of Return Path goes into some more details claiming that 97% of email sending systems are not setup properly. Bottom line is if your with a sending email service provider using shared IP addresses, or your email provider doesn’t offer dedicated IP addresses, you'll eventually experience delivery problems. Your IP address is your Web identity, and it should not be shared with anybody for any reason. The reputation of all senders sharing your IP address affect your reputation. When you use your own dedicated IP you’re the only one that affects your reputation.

Reference: Initial Blog Post