We recently wrote a blog post on the new spamhaus domain blacklist and what that means for your company.  You can read that here to get up to date on the subject.

We thought we’d carry on this subject to offer you advice on how to make sure that you are doing all you can to avoid the domain blacklists.

Self-Built Mailing Lists

Arguably the best thing you can do to avoid blacklists is have an opted in, self-built list.  The reason for this is that the people on that list have specifically asked for your emails to be sent to them and they will be much less inclined to report it as spam if they have recently asked for these communications.

Correct Sign Up Processes

So you’ve decided to avoid the purchased list route and go for the self-generated option – fine work.  But then you go and sneak in the subscription details where you can and essentially sign people up without them really knowing that they’ve opted in.

This will straight away cause high complaint rates against your campaigns as you’ve not let them choose whether they want to be on the list.  If you’re unsure whether your sign up process is being done correctly, just think “is it opt-in?” Are your subscribers actually requesting this information or are you assuming that they will want it? 

Be Consistent

A trap that people can fall into is that they do have a self-built list but haven’t emailed that list in some time.  At this point, you run the risk of subscribers forgetting signing up for your emails and marking them as spam.  The longer you hold off from sending to them, the worse it will get.

Feedback Loops

A good way to keep control of your reputation with ISP’s is to have feedback loops set up.  Feedback loops allow ISP’s to report the spam complaints they have received from their users back to you.  This allows you to then remove these subscribers from future mailings and also keep track of how your campaign is being received.  Of course, if you’re a mailingmanager customer, this is already set up for you and monitored.

Authentication

This is a subject which really requires a whole post of its own, so I will try and put this is in an understandable nutshell.

Authentication was introduced to counter spoofing and phishing emails being sent to its intended recipients.  A spoofing email is that has had its ‘send from’ and ‘reply to’ addresses changed from the actual sending domain.  This can lead to phishing, which is when you receive an email from someone claiming to be your bank etc and asking you to fill in your details, but they are in fact trying to obtain your card details and money.

The problem is, legitimate email marketing can occasionally be caught in this same net if you use ESP’s.  This is because you’re masking the ESP’s sending domain with your own.  The filters sometimes won’t be able to differentiate between the two and will put your campaigns in the same category.

So Authentication was brought in to make sure that the legitimate senders could be distinguished from the ‘bad guys’.  The different authentication systems are:

Domain Keys
DKIM
SPF
Sender ID

If you are a current mailingmanager customer though, we will for this month only do this for you free of charge.  Contact us to request your authentication file.

Furthermore, any new customer that signs up for a monthly account before March 31st, 2010, will also receive the authentication set up at no additional cost.  The normal cost for this service is £75 + VAT.

I have brushed upon this subject in a previous post but as this Spamhaus DBL is coming into place, it is worth going into more detail.As I’m sure most of you know, sending reputation has been predominantly based on the IP address that your mail is originating from.  This means that if you had a serious blacklisting problem on your sending IP address, you could just move to another address and your reputation would start again.

With domain listing, you can’t escape as easily.  Your sending domain, regardless of the IP you’re on will still have that listing against it.  Obviously, the IP reputation will still be a bug factor but this added factor of domain based reputation means the sender has culpability for their actions.

So you can’t now escape your bad sending practices – definitely a good thing for the future of email marketing but what could that mean for you?  Well, let’s say you are a good sender but fall into trouble for some reason; you could end up having your works email address blocked due to your marketing activity.

A good way to avoid this is to put all of your marketing mails onto a different domain so that any of the repercussions of your marketing activities don’t directly effect the day to day running of your company.

Of course, that should never happen in the first place if you are a legitimate conscientious sender.