When sending emails, to make sure you are not going to get into trouble with Spam lists, or worse, a violation of Federal law, here is a summary of the CAN-SPAM act:

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

By: Chris Lewis

When you send out an email and something goes wrong with it being delivered it is usually returned to you or "bounced".  Bounced emails can happen for various reasons, some of them being permanent and some of them being temporary.

Hard Bounces - Hard bounces happen when any of the SMTP servers down that the email address you used to send will just never work.  One of the first reasons an email will not reach it's destination is that the domain name does not exist.  The second reason is that the mailbox on the mail server for that domain just does not exist.  Hard bounces are usually characterized by a 500-series error.  When an email is returned with a 500 series error inside, Campaign Enterprise and Email Marketing Director will categorize these as hard bounces.  Usually when a hard bounce like this occurs, you mark a hard bounce field in the corresponding database record, and then when you send using that list again you filter out any email records that have this hard bounce field marked.  Since it is a permanent failure, there is no reason to try sending to that address again.  Aside from other information you want to keep in that record, the email address is virtually useless.

Soft Bounces - When a returned email not a 500-series return code, it is assumed to be a temporary or soft bounce.  These types of bounces usually mean the domain is good and the email box is valid but for some reason the email server is not accepting any emails for this address at the present time.  The reasons can range from the mail box is full, the server is too busy, or the person has marked his account as being on holiday.  In the case of soft bounces, it is ok to try again the next time you send using that list.  There will come a time though when maybe too many soft bounces really means a hard bounce...where an email box is always full (maybe not in use).  In this case, you many not want to filter soft bounces out until a certain point, say, you get 20 soft bounces for that email address. In that case, you can filter the email list to exclude any records that have over 20 soft bounces.  Now this is very arbitrary so you will have to set the number of times a record can soft bounce before you remove it from the list.  Many times, sending emails to these addresses over and over is ok because the destination mail server does see the email box as valid, just not reachable, and that is not a bad mark on you.

So, for many, they just worry about hard bounces because those are the ones they can get in trouble with concerning the big mail providers.  I would recommend just ignoring the soft bounce recording but it is up to your companies conventions.

BTW: Hotmail just got transformed to a new mail service called OUTLOOK.COM.  We will be following this change to see how it affects our customer's deliver ability so check back over the next few weeks.
 

Bounced email is a subject that comes up very often in our tech support department.  In this blog we will try to define all the aspects of email bounced and how to deal with them.  But first we need a reason...

Dealing with bounced emails is very important.  Many times bounced emails are just ignored because it does not "cost" anything to just keep sending to the same email addresses.  The problem is that many mail providers like AOL, Hotmail, Gmail are all sensitive to emails sent to them that do not exist.  For instance, if you are sending 1000 emails to AOL addresses and hundreds of them does not exist, AOL will consider you a spammer because you are not a "good citizen" and will at some point not allow your SMTP server to send ANY more email to them.  When you do this to all the major email providers all the time you can see why many of the emails you send out will just not make it to the REAL end users.  So overall, you need to deal with bounces to keep your reputation clean.

As explained in a previous blog, bounces can happen immediately or delayed.  Immediate bounces happen when your SMTP server rejects the email the instant it is submitted.  These records can be marked as "bad" in Campaign Enterprise and then you would filter these addresses on the next send or just delete them completely.  The delayed bounced emails are the tricky ones.  Here is how a bounce is generated:

1. You send an email using your SMTP server
2. You SMTP server verifies the format of the email address and accepts the email message into it's queue
3. Sometime later, your SMTP server looks up the MX record for the domain of the email address (like AOL.COM)
4. If the domain does not exist, then your SMTP server sends a bounced email to your bounced email account
5. If the domain exists, your SMTP server now contacts the destination SMTP server
6. The email message is submitted to the destination SMTP server
7. The destination SMTP can immediately reject the email message, and if it does, then your SMTP server sends a bounced email to your bounced email account.
8. If the destination SMTP does accept your email message, it can then reject it later if it finds a problem.  In that case, the destination email address will send a bounce email to your bounced email account.

So, from all of this, you can see that the actual bounced email you receive can come from many different sources.  The "Wild West" reference in the title refers to this process and also to the actual contents of the bounced email: There are no rules about the content.  This makes if very difficult for us. To properly record a bounce we need to know two major things: The original email address we sent to, and what the error was.  Sounds easy?  Nope.  With all the email systems throughout the world, there are that many different bounced email formats, and they change, all the time.  So harvesting information from bounced emails is truly an "art" and is a good reason to keep updating your Campaign Enterprise product because we strive to keep up with all these formats.

In tomorrow's blog, we will discuss the differences between "soft" and "hard" bounces because it is a big subject in how to deal with these.

By: Jim Kinkade

To keep email deliverability high, it is very important to be aware of the possibility of getting blacklisted. By following good email marketing practices and being diligent in keeping your list clean and up to date you can lessen the chance of getting on a blacklist. Being aware and understanding behaviors that can get you listed on a blacklist is the first step to getting your email into the inbox and out of the junk or bulk mail folder as well. Here are some things to consider when sending marketing email, if you want to stay in good standing, and off of the "spam cop" block lists.

No email software program can keep your mail server and domain from getting blacklisted if you not following good practices. There are features built into our programs that will help you stay in compliance with the CAN SPAM law and even help with keeping on the good side of the "spam cops". But to really understand how this all works it is important to know that the CAN SPAM law and the spam cops are not the same thing.

The CAN SPAM law is a US law and is a legal entity, non-compliance can get you fined or arrested, although this happens rarely and only when the offender is a true "spammer".

Spam cops are more like self-appointed "cops" or vigilantes who watch and report behaviors that are considered to be "spam" like. Because so many ISP's use the information provided by the spam cops to police the emails coming into their servers; it is important, if not imperative, to comply with the "unwritten laws" of email. Complying with "best practices" as well as making sure you are complying with the actual CAN SPAM law is your best defense against getting blacklisted.

We recommend using a "home grown" list, if possible, but renting and buying lists are also common practices. Renting or buying a list can pose problems. The quality of the list is the primary concern. Your list is only as good as the list broker who sells it. It is important if you ever rent or buy a list, that you ask certain questions of the broker. The best list is a list that you have compiled from customers either coming to you and making a purchase or at least signing up with you and requesting information. When someone makes a purchase or requests to be added to your list you will want to respond promptly. An email sent very soon after their request or purchase makes it less likely that they will forget your company or organization and possibly mark your message as spam as they delete it. Send them an email quickly so that it imprints with them that you are a known company, one that they want to receive information from. Also asking your customers to whitelist you or add you as a contact will help too.

But in cases where you or your client wants to use a rented or purchased list these questions (at least) should be asked of the list broker before purchase of the list has been made. Even when the answers to these questions are positive, proceed slowly. That way if there is an issue you will know after sending 1000 emails rather than after sending 20,000.

1. Is this list opt in? If so, how did the person opt in and when? The broker should be able to provide this information or at least have it available if you ask.
2. Has the broker ever harvested emails or is there any possibility that a harvested email could be in their list. The answer to that should be an absolute NO.
3. Is the list checked frequently (at least monthly) for hard bounces and are they removed? This answer should be YES, certainly.

Once our program is set up properly, it can track unsubscribes and mark them in the list so that you do not send to them again. This is necessary and required by the CAN SPAM law which governs email marketing in the United States. You need to look over the CAN SPAM law and follow the rules closely. There are many things that this law requires, and noncompliance can get you blacklisted or blocked at the very least.

Again, when configured properly our program can track hard bounces and mark them in the list so that you do not send to them again It is extremely important to track and filter out any hard bounces of your list. Hard bounces in your sent can hurt your deliverability. While this is not a law, it is one of the things the spam cops watch. Also the incoming mail servers look closely at your hard bounce rate, if they see a send coming from your mail servers with a high percentage of the emails being hard bounces (and that can be 10 % or less) they may look more closely at your message before delivering it, deliver it to the junk folder, or even not deliver it at all. Spam cops also track high hard bounce sends and having a lot of hard bounces in your send can get you into trouble with them.

Our software does have the ability to throttle the sends (limit how many get sent to your server per hour). Sometimes sending very fast is not the best option There are times you may want to throttle your send, especially when sending to certain domains such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail, AOL and many others. Targeted throttling for specific domains may be a function available on your SMTP server.

One of the biggest factors in getting on a blacklist is the list you use. There are many things spam cops track with relation to your list. Is your list rented or purchased? That can count against you because when you use rented lists the receivers are more likely to mark your message as spam. If very many people do that, you can get blacklisted. If you list contains lots of older email addresses, that can get you into trouble because it will likely result in a higher hard bounce rate which spam cops also track. Also, if your list ever contains email address that have been "harvested", (and the spam cops have lots of traps out there to track that) you almost certainly will get blacklisted. And finally, if your list has people who are not opt-ins (asked for information from your company) they are more likely to mark your message as spam as they delete it and that is not good, the isp's track this and may report this to spam cops or are at least likely to send your message to the junk folder if they deliver it at all.

Any mail server that has smtp enabled is fine to use with our software. Make sure that your client adds the mail server they are going to use to their domain registration, so that the reverse dns checks out. Many of our customers use either PowerMTA by Port 25, Ironport or Ispwitch for their mail servers.

You are eligible for free upgrades when you maintain an active support plan. Updates are free whether you have support or not.

To recap, Campaign Enterprise:

1. Helps you manage bounces
2. Helps you manage unsubscribes and includes list-unsubscribe headers, which are important
3. Message personalization helps you create relevant emails based on your client's interests
4. Database interaction helps you hone your message personalization for more targeted, and therefore more relevant lists

If you have any additional questions, please feel free to call our office at 949-218-3852.

HOW TO: Combine Email Lists in Email Marketing Director List segmentation is always a good idea when conducting email marketing campaigns. Breaking your lists into smaller batches gives you more control and allows you to personalize the message with a greater degree of relevancy.

There may be times however, when you need to send something to everybody in all your various lists or list segments. One of the newest features in Email Marketing Director gives you the ability to send a campaign to multiple email lists without requiring you to combine your lists together.

To use this feature, edit the campaign you want to go to multiple lists and go to Step #1, Lists and Filters.

• Check the box next to "Use Multiple Lists"
• Click Add list
• Select the first list from the dropdown menu
• Click Add list again

The lists are displayed in the "Select an email list" box, repeat steps for all the lists you want to include.

As you add the lists, note that the Preview screen below indicates the total of the combined lists. The bounces and unsubscribes are automatically filtered and when you send, the addresses are deduped upon running the campaign.