On a daily basis I talk with people that send out email campaigns either on their clients behalf or as a part of their internal operations. Most, if not all, have no idea the impact of the aspects affecting email delivery. Gone are the days of just blasting out email and itâs all delivered to intended recipients. The following four factors are critical to email delivery and should be a high priority to anybody concerned about email delivery:
- Static IP addresses are critical.
- Forward and reverse DNS lookups for your domain name are a must.
- SPF record implementation is key.
- Domain Keys are important and will be required soon.
Spammers have created such a high degree of checks and balances that it has become very difficult for sender of legitimate bulk email to get through to intended recipients. Here are some other things you need to be aware of if your sending out email campaigns, newsletters, invoices or any business critical email communications.
- ISP direct email to the bulk mail folder based on many factors. Some include the IP address/domain of the sender.
- Too many connections to an ISP will cause blocking content of the message.
- Too many emails sent that have the same exact content causes delivery problems.
- Member complaints directed to the mailer need to be addressed.
- If the sender generates excessive unknown recipients, or bounces is a problem since ISPâs deny connections from an IP address with a low delivery rate.
- Poorly formatted, or invalid, HTML will kill your campaign.
- A high HTML to content ratio will negatively impact delivery.
Freeware email servers do not fully address these problems. New email application servers such as ActivSoftware XMS are a capable replacement that addresses most of the problems you currently experience.
