Return Path FAQs

BIMI records are stored in the DNS as a TXT (text) record with the following syntax. For details on all BIMI technical specifications, please visit:

BIMI Specifiations

Please note that all of the examples below are for illustrative purposes only. Be sure to use your own selector, domain and logo information or your logo will not display.

Components of a BIMI DNS record

All of the components listed below are required in order for BIMI to work correctly.

Selector:Allows the domain owner to use different logos for different subscribers, similar to a DKIM selector.

The value is specified by the sender in the BIMI-Selector header.

The default value is "default". The "default" selector is used to look up the BIMI record when a BIMI-Selector header is not inserted into an email.

A mailbox provider looks at the selector name in your email to determine where to look up the BIMI record for your domain.

BIMI subdomain:The subdomain that identifies the record as a BIMI record.

The value is always "_bimi".

Domain name: The domain name where the BIMI record is stored in the DNS.

Top level domain name: The top level domain associated with your domain name (typically .com, .net, .org, etc)

Assertion record: Stores your logo information.

Correct syntax for the DNS record

<selector>.<bimisubdomain>.<domainname>.<topleveldomainname>

Examples:

brandx._bimi.brand.com

default._bimi.zzzcompany.net

Components of the Assertion record

v = Version: the value is always BIMI1. (Required)

l = Location: the URL of your logo using HTTPS only. (Required)

a = Trust authority (self, cert, or mva); trust certificate URL to validate domain ownership. (Optional)

Most companies use cert;URL of the Verified Mark Certificate.

Correct syntax for the assertion record

v=<version>; l=<location URL>; a=<trustauthority;URL>;

Example:

v=BIMI1; l=https://subdomain.sampledomain.com/image/logo.svg; a=cert;https://subdomain.brand.com/vmc/logo.pem;

Example of a full BIMI TXT record as seen in the DNS for a domain

No Verified Mark Certificate:

brandx._bimi.brand.com IN TXT "v=BIMI1; l=https://subdomain.brand.com/image/logo.svg; a=;"

With a Verified Mark Certificate:

default._bimi.brand.com IN TXT "v=BIMI1; l=https://subdomain.brand.com/image/logo.svg; a=cert;https://subdomain.brand.com/vmc/logo.pem;"

Follow the steps below for your logo to display correctly at participating mailbox providers.For details on all BIMI technical specifications, please visit:

BIMI Specifications

Pre-work

Make sure BIMI is supported.

Contact your email administrator, email service provider, or domain hosting company and ask what steps are required to implement BIMI.

If BIMI implementation is not covered under a service agreement, ask what steps you need to take to set it up yourself using the information below.

Implement DMARC authentication on all marketing email.

Passing DMARC is required for BIMI to work.

Check email headers at Gmail, Microsoft, or Verizon Media (AOL and Yahoo!) in Return Path Platform to see if DMARC is passing.

DMARC policy (p=) must be "quarantine" or "reject" for Verizon Media (AOL and Yahoo!), otherwise your logo will not display.

Determine which logo your subscribers should see for your brand.

BIMI requires the SVG (.svg) image format. Other image formats may be supported in the future.

The image must be a square, centered, and only be your logo without text.

Participating mailbox providers should size the image appropriately.

Store your logo using HTTPS and note the URL string (e.g. https://subdomain.brand.com/image/logo.svg).

Your logo will not display using HTTP.

Be sure to update the image if you rebrand.

If you change the location of your logo, your DNS TXT record will also need to be updated with the new URL.

(Optional) Obtain a Verified Mark Certificate.

A Verified Mark Certificate is currently optional but may be required in the future.

Store your certificate using HTTPS and note the URL string (e.g.https://subdomain.brand.com/vmc/logo.pem).

The URL is entered into the assertion record within the a= tag.

Determine how to measure success once BIMI is deployed.

It is a good idea to have your "before BIMI" metrics so you can compare them to metrics after BIMI is implemented.

Typical engagement metrics such as reads and click-throughs are good to track, but also look at revenue and average order value.

BIMI Implementation

Create the DNS TXT (text) record for your domain

Choose your domain and selector.

Note the "From:" domain ( RFC5322 ) used in your marketing emails. This is the domain where you create the DNS TXT record.

Choose a selector name. The selector name is what a mailbox provider uses to look up your BIMI record.

Use the "default" selector name if:

You have a single brand or testing one brand prior to implementing your other brands.

There are technical constraints to adding the BIMI-selector header into your emails.

Most senders use "default" to start because it is is faster to implement than choosing a selector name and inserting the BIMI-Selector header.

Choosing "default" means that you aren't required to insert the BIMI-Selector header into your emails.

Choose your selector name if:

You plan on rolling out BIMI to multiple brands and you need more control over how the logos are displayed.

A selector name is whatever you want it to be, but keep it short. Examples are: a date (July2019) or a brand name (brandabc).

The selector name you choose should have meaning and purpose that makes sense for your business.

Create a DNS TXT (text) record for the domain you noted above.

Use the instructions provided by your email service provider or domain hosting company if you are creating the TXT record yourself.

Be sure you use the correct syntax.

Be sure you include all required tags in the assertion record.

Your DNS BIMI record should resemble one of the examples below (usingyour selector, domain, logo URL, and Verified Mark Certificate URL):

No Verified Mark Certificate:

brandx._bimi.brand.com IN TXT "v=BIMI1; l=https://subdomain.brand.com/image/logo.svg; a=;"

With a Verified Mark Certificate:

brandx._bimi.brand.com IN TXT "v=BIMI1; l=https://subdomain.brand.com/image/logo.svg; a=cert;https://subdomain.brand.com/vmc/logo.pem;"

If you use the "default" selector name, it should resemble this:

default._bimi.brand.com IN TXT "v=BIMI1; l=https://subdomain.brand.com/image/logo.svg; a=;"

Insert (sign) the BIMI-Selector header into your emails

If you are using the "default" selector name, it is not necessary to insert the BIMI-Selector header into your emails. Participating mailbox providers automatically look up your BIMI record using "default". Just make sure your DNS TXT record is accurate as demonstrated by the example above.

If you are using a selector name other than the "default" selector name:

Consult your technical team or email service provider to determine the best way to insert it into your emails.

Be sure the BIMI-Selector header has the correct syntax.

Be sure the s= value in the BIMI-Selector header matches the selector name in the DNS exactly, or your logo will not display.

Mailbox providers are increasing their dependence on subscriber engagement metrics to determine your sending reputation and to decide if your email reaches the inbox.

Effectively improving engagement involves obtaining high quality subscribers, targeting them with relevant content, optimizing the mobile experience, and testing different subscriber segments and content to find out what resonates with your customers.

List acquisition

Use opt-in consent methods: More people engage with your email when they choose to receive it. Don’t assume consent is given after a purchase or document download.

Preference center: A subscriber is more invested with your email program when they get to choose what content they want and how often they receive it.

Welcome message incentive: Provide a special offer or discount in the welcome message. It incentivizes subscribers to engage with your email early in the relationship so they look forward to receiving future messages.

Don’t send to your suppression list: It can be tempting to send to people that previously subscribed, but you run the risk of sending to recycled spam traps.

List Hygiene

Implement a re-engagement strategy: Determine when subscribers stop engaging with your email program. Unengaged subscribers lower your engagement rate. Incentivize subscribers to re-engage with special offers or discounts. After a couple of attempts with no response, add the subscriber to your suppression list.

Send a re-permission campaign: A more aggressive approach is to send dormant subscribers a single email requesting them to reconfirm their consent. Suppress anyone that does not reply. Incorporate this into a re-engagement strategy for best results.

Suppress unknown users after one bounce: Mailbox providers bounce an inactive email address as an unknown user prior to creating it into a recycled spam trap.

Suppress anyone that complains: Sign up with all available feedback loops and remove any subscriber that complains. Once someone complains, all future emails are placed in the spam folder. If you don’t suppress them, they become an unengaged user.

Make it easy to unsubscribe: If someone no longer wants to receive your email then it is better they unsubscribe instead of going dormant and deleting your email without reading it.

Targeting and segmentation

Have a plan for engaging customers at each stage of the customer lifecycle (awareness, research, comparison, purchase, post-purchase): Your customers require different messaging depending on where they are in the lifecycle.

Use available data to segment your email list: Popular segments are often based on: purchase history and frequency, prospects, current customers, location, event attendance, in-store buyers vs online buyers, and demographics. Create content and offers appropriate for each segment.

Triggered messaging: Send messages to a subscriber based on an action they took (abandoned shopping cart, account login) or an anniversary (birthday, anniversary, renewal reminder).

Personalization: Tied to segmentation, subscribers are more likely to engage when a message is personalized to their individual tastes. Using their name, location, time of day, weather, and product recommendations make your email more relevant to the recipient.

Content

Use well-crafted subject lines and preheaders. Make use of exclusive offers and present a sense of urgency such as a limited time offer. Ensure the preheader provides a summary about the content of the message.

Use responsive design techniques: Make sure your content renders well on mobile devices and desktop computers.

Use interactive content: Interactive polls, animated GIFs, Image rollovers and video are all effective at increasing engagement.

Ensure call-to-action buttons and URLs are large and easily clickable. Small buttons and URLs that are difficult to see and click may be missed.

Use images sparingly: Use images that have the highest emotional impact since there are some mobile devices and webmail providers that have images off by default. When images do render, a large number of images makes interaction with the content more difficult.

Keep content easily skimmable: Get to the point and make content so someone can scroll using a thumb or finger in a few seconds. Many mobile users read content while on-the-go and don’t want to spend time scrolling and reading a lot of text.

Ensure discount codes and barcodes are easy to find: Display these within your content so subscribers can locate them with minimal scrolling.

Include social sharing buttons: Encourage your socially active subscribers to share your information with friends and family.

Test

Your customers may respond differently to changes in your email program and you need to figure out what resonates with them the most. Testing different elements of your email program is a part of any successful marketing effort.

Monitor competition

Sometimes your competition produces email that connects with their customers. Review competitor emails and see if there are design elements or offers you can provide your customers. It’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of the competition and trends in your industry to help you fine-tune your email program and improve engagement.

If you are only considering changing ESPs or if you have already made the decision to move to a new ESP, notify your Account Manager or Relationship Manager as soon as possible so you can get more information and so you have time to properly plan the migration.

Proper planning and execution is vital to minimize disruptions to your business during the transition. Warming up new IPs and domains is not always a simple process. How it is executed can be determined by the complexity and nuances of your email program including sending volume, frequency, IP & list segmentation, number of email streams, number of brands, and list quality.

Step 1: Notify your Account Manager or Relationship Manager

If you are a Gold Plus or Platinum level service customer, your Account Manager will guide you through this process and work with the Certification team to add your new IPs.

If you are a Silver Plus, Gold, Certification-only, or self-service customer, please follow the steps below.

Step 2: Notify the Certification team

If you are a Certification customer and you do not notify or have an Account Manager or Relationship Manager, please notify the Certification team about your ESP change plans.

If you are increasing the number of IP addresses or domains and/or you anticipate the warmup taking more than three months (most warmups can be completed in 4-6 weeks on average), contact the Certification team at [email protected]. A Certification Specialist will work with you should your service level need adjusting.

If you are only replacing the current number of IPs and domains and not increasing send volume, you can contact the Certification team once the IPs have been allocated to your account by your new ESP. Proceed to the next step.

Supporting resources:

Certified senders benefit during an IP address migration

Tommy Bahama : Credits being Certified as contributing factor for near seamless transition to new ESP.

Boozt Improves Relationships with Target Mailbox Providers Through Return Path Certification and IP Warm-Up : Improved Microsoft Inbox Placement rate from 0\% to 100\%, and open rates from 20\% to 23\%

Step 3: Choose an ESP

For specific questions you can ask an ESP during your due diligence process, refer to the Return Path blog: How to Choose an Email Service Provider.

Supporting resources:

ClickMail Marketing’s free ESP Selection Guide (scroll down the page and on the Choose tab, click on READ OUR GUIDE)

Red Pill Email’s Email Vendor Features & Functions Guide

Step 4: Acquire your new IP address number(s) and domain name(s) from your new ESP and/or hosting provider. Don’t start your warmup yet!

If you are a Certification customer, be sure the IPs are dedicated. Only dedicated IP addresses can be added to your Certification account.

Step 5: Add your new IP to your Certification account.

If you did not notify the Certification team in Step 2 above, please be sure to add your IPs to your Certification account prior to starting the IP warmup process. The Certification team will add them to your account and work with you if there are any issues with compliance.

Contact the Certification team by sending an email to: [email protected]. Be sure to include your business name, your name and contact information and the list of new IPs you wish to add to your account.

New IPs undergo infrastructure checks from the Certification team to ensure they are in compliance. These checks often surface issues that could cause problems during the IP warmup which you can fix before the warmup begins.

Step 6: Set up your new IP and domain with the Return Path Product Suite

Start collecting data on your new IPs to help spot potential issues with your deliverability and sending reputation during and after the warmup process.

Contact your Account Manager to add your new IP to Return Path Platform

Set up the Return Path Seed List with your new ESP

Set up your custom and special tags for tracking within Email Client Monitor

Step 7: Warm up new IP and/or new domain

Warming up your new IP address or domain is extremely important and can have a negative effect on your deliverability if not managed correctly. Contact your Account Manager or Relationship Manager if you are interested in receiving a managed IP warmup service with a Return Path Professional Services consultant.

Prior to warming up your new IP, confirm that the new IP has been added to your Certification account by checking your Certification dashboard in the Return Path Product Suite or by reviewing your Daily Performance Report (DPR). During the warmup process, your new IP will receive Certification benefits as long as compliance thresholds are met.

If you prefer to warmup your new IP or domain on your own, the articles below can provide general guidance to help you warm them up successfully.

How to warm up an IP address

How to warm up a domain

If you are a Certification customer and have any delays during the warmup process, please keep your Account Manager, Relationship Manager, and/or the Certification team updated to help prevent potential suspensions of your new IPs. Delays sometime happen, so keeping the Certification team updated can help the process go smoothly. Contact the Certification team by sending an email to: [email protected].

Step 8: Notify the Certification team when the warmup is complete and the old IPs have zero volume.

Contact the Certification team by sending an email to: [email protected]. Let them know that the warmup is complete so they can remove the old IP addresses from your account. Be sure to include your business name, your name and contact information, and the list of old IP addresses you wish to remove from your account.

Issue

You see a sharp increase in complaints at one or more mailbox providers.

Common causes

Many scenarios can cause a sharp increase in complaints:

You stopped usingopt-in permission methods with subscribers

You recently used a high-risk list acquisition method such as list purchase, list harvesting or co-registration

You do not have or changed yourlist hygiene strategy

You accidentally sent emailto a suppression list

You senta new email stream to subscribers without their consent

You suddenly increased the sending frequency of email to your subscribersduring a major holiday

You updated your branding (which changedthe look and feel of your content) without notifying subscribers

There was a breakdown in the complaint-handling process

An ad-hoc email was sent to the entire list file

Your sending volume dropped significantly in a short period of time relative to your average sending volume (aka complaint hangover)

Products and data used to troubleshoot

Return Path Platformcan show which campaigns are receiving complaints overthe last 7, 15, and 30 days. You can also use itto look for trends over time. For example, you may see complaint spikes on certain days or within certain time periods. And your SmartSeeds persona data can be useful in determining how engaged your subscribers may be with your email.

Email Client Monitor can be used to see which subscribers are opening your emails and on what platforms so you can optimize your mailing programfor them. You can include customtagging and a subscriber ID to receive detailed information about your subscribers and use this data to help determine what segment, or segments, are complaining about your email.

If you are Certified, you can see 30 day's worth of aggregate data in the user interface,or download 30-day daily data to see when complaints occurred at Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Cloudmark to help you determine what may be driving complaints.

Email Service Providers (ESPs)may provide feedback loop complaint datathrough their sending platform or from a report for each mailbox provider. Contact your ESP account representative for more information about how you can access complaint data.

Internal feedback loop complaint data is obtained from your company's mail system. Contact your email administrator or IT department to help you pull complaint data foreach mailbox provider.

Troubleshooting

To isolate the cause of the problem:

1. Determine if the complaints suggestthat a recent change to your mailing program caused dissatisfaction.

Review the list of possible causes above to see if any of those scenarios could be a possible reason for the complaints. An unexpected increase in sending frequency, new list acquisition sources, and sending to a suppression file are the most common reasons for sharp increases in complaint rates, so check those first.

2. Determine if the complaints are coming from a specific segment of your list.

For example, are they comingfrom:

Less engaged subscribers?

Anew group of subscribers recently added to your list?

Subscribers from a specific acquisition source?

Examinethesegment to determine what sets it apart from the others. For example, if you recently added a new group of subscribers to your list and that group has a higher complaint rate than the rest of the list, examine how that list was acquired and whether the mailing you sent met the expectations that were presented at the point of collection.

3. Review whether your sending volume is consistent.

You may be experiencing complaint hangover. For example, senders typically send a significantly higher volume of mail in December to encourage customers to purchase gifts, then taper off after December 25th. It is common to see a spike in complaints the first business day in January when subscribers checktheir work email and complainabout the emails they received.Complaint rates are calculated by dividing the number of complaints received by the number of emails delivered within a given time frame. The date the campaign was sent is not factored into the rate.

To avoid complaint hangover, maintain a consistent sending volume.If this does not fit your business needs, be aware of the possibility of complaint hangover.If the spike is a result of a decrease in volume, then watch your complaint rates for several days to see if the complaints normalize. If they do not, look to other potential causes for the spike.

4. Determine if the complaints are associated with a specific IP address, brand, sending domain or email stream.

Organizations with a more sophisticated email programcan sometimes associate a sharp increase in complaints to a specific brand, IP address, sending domain or email stream. There may be multiple people in charge of different parts of the email sending process, so work with them to ensure email best practices are being followed.

Complaints occur when the email sent to subscribers does not meet their expectations.A preference center is a good way to help reduce complaints sinceit allows subscribers to choose the content and frequency ofemail they want toreceive.

Issue

Your emails are being deferred based on reputation issues.

Common scenarios

A mailbox provider may defer email for a number of reasons, such as an influx of volume during the holiday season or issues with system capacity. Negative reputation metrics are another common cause of deferrals at an IP address or domain level.

Email may be deferred based on reputation if your IP address or domain has little or no sending history andtherefore no reputation.

Data

SMTP logs will help you confirm that a deferral is in place and may help you identify why the mailbox provider is deferring your email. In addition, view all available data sources to identify negative reputation metrics related to bounce codes,time frames, IP addresses, mailstreams, and the domains identified, including the data in:

Certification

Return Path Platform

Troubleshooting

To determine the cause of deferrals:

Consider the following questions:

Are all mailings being deferred or are you only experiencing partialdeferrals?

Is the deferral widespread or is it related to a particular brand, IP address, sending domain, or mail stream?

When did the deferral start? Is it increasing? Is it decreasing?

Is the deferral constant or sporadic?

Do the deferrals occur on a specific day or time of day?

Has this deferral occurred before? If so, could it have been triggered by the same reason?

Are you sending from a new IP address or domain?

Review the SMTP bounce logs to identify potential causes.

Contact your email administrator or email service provider to obtain the SMTP logs. Some email service providers may not be able to produce the log files but they may have a report you can run that shows the mailbox provider response codes that look similar to the following examples:

421 RP-001 (COL0-MC3-F15) Unfortunately, some messages from xx.xxx.xxx.xx weren't sent. Please try again. We have limits for how many messages can be sent per hour and per day. You can also refer to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.

421 RP-001: The mail server IP connecting to Outlook.com server has exceeded the rate limit allowed. Reason for rate limitation is related to IP/domain reputation. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your Email/Internet Service Provider for help.

Review how well your sending practices adhereto the mailbox provider's sender guidelines.

If you are sending from a new IP address and domain, go through a proper warm-up process to establish a good sending reputation.

Confirm that you did not accidentallysend to asuppression list.

Ensure you are following best practices for list acquisition and list hygiene.

Validate the receipt and suppression of complaints from thefeedback loop.

Analyze the data for:

High complaint rates and complaint rate spikes

Volume attempted andvolume spikes

High unknown user rates and unknown user rate spikes

A high number of spam trap hits or a spike in the number of hits

Engagement metrics, such asrecent open andclick activity of subscribers, and read rates

Timing of the deferrals, such as on a specific day, end of day, end of large send

Whitelisting status,if applicable

Although you can resend deferred messages, you should identify the root cause of the deferral first and resolve the underlying issue. Until then, deferrals may continue and your sending queues will likely clog with undelivered and retried messages. If left unresolved, a deferral could escalate into a block.

If your mail is being blocked by a mailbox provider:

1. Review your bounce logs.

A policy block bounce contains a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol(SMTP) error code identifying the reason, which can help youdetermine the cause of the block. The SMTP error code for a block usually contains a5XX number, and sometimes a 4XX number,and may look like this:

550 SC-003: Mail rejected by Outlook.com for policy reasons. Your IP address appears to be an open proxy or relay. If you are not an email or network administrator, please contact your mailbox provider for help.

AOL 421 DYN: T1 block. This is a temporary block caused by high complaints or low IP reputation.

Policy blocks are almost always related to:

A poor IP or domainsending reputation, which may reflect a high complaint rate, high number of unknown users, sending to spam traps, and low engagement

Access denied (beingin the queue too long)

AnIP address or domain listed on a blacklist

Spam-like characteristics (search for spam or abusein your bounce logs)

Too many connections opened to the receiving server and sending too many emails in a short period of time (connectionand throughput)

A new IP address or domain

Sending to a suppression list

To learn more about the mailbox providers' bounce process and possibly bounce codes, refer to:

AOL Postmaster site

ATT and Bellsouth

Bluetie

Comcast

Cox

Gmail

Microsoft

Yahoo! SMTP Error Code Table :

Yahoo! SMTP Logs

2. Assess and troubleshoot the situation.

Consider the following questions:

Are all mailings being blocked, or is it a partial block?

Is the block across all mailbox providers or just one?

Is the block widespread or is it isolated to a specific day,date, time, IP address, domain, or mail stream?

When did the block start? Is it getting worse or better?

Is the block constant or sporadic?

Ensurethat email was not accidentally sent to a suppression file.

Review your complaint handling process and ensure all complainers no longer receive email.

Ensure your bounce handling process is working correctly and that unknown users are removed after one to two bounces.

Review your list acquisition methods. Did you acquire or purchase new addresses recently from a third party?

Review your list hygiene methods to ensure you are sending to people that want to receive your email and engage with you frequently based on yourbusiness

3. Review all other data sources about the mailings to identify negative reputation metrics relating to the bounce codes,time frame, IP addresses, mail streams, and domainsas described in steps 1 and 2above.

Sources can include:

Your email and engagementdata

Return Path Certification data

Return Path Platform

Microsoft Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) data if the policy block is from Outlook

4. Fix the rootcause of the block.

Mailbox providers are less likely tolift a block until they see the sending metrics related to the block improve.

5. Contact the mailbox provider through its postmaster site and request the block be lifted.

Be sure to address the root causes of the block; otherwise, the blockwill not be lifted and it may make it more difficult to get the block lifted in the future.

Here is a partial list of mailbox provider support form sites to open a support ticket.

AOL

Microsoft

Yahoo

Comcast

The key to understanding a policy block is to review and use all available datato pinpoint the potential root cause. Blocked email addresses should be removed temporarily and not mailed to until the sender has fixed the issuescausing the block. After the cause of block is resolved, the mailbox provider should start accepting email again.

Hotmail was one of the first web-based email services, which launched in 1996. The name Hotmail was created after HTML, or HoTMaiL. It's one of the most popular domains in the world and dominates the Brazilian, Australian, and European markets for email providers. Microsoft has established offices throughout the world to support its email infrastructure as well as to gain needed insights to tailor their tools and services to their diverse set of global users.

In 2013, Microsoft rebranded Hotmail and Windows Live Mail to Outlook.com.

Here are some key Microsoft statistics and information:

Active users: Over 400 million

Inbound emails that reach the inbox on average: 30\% to 35\%

In 2016, Microsoft merged their Office 365 platform with its other email platforms. Since 2017, all Microsoft email operates on one consolidated platform.

Infrastructure

Region

Global

Domains

hotmail.com; Microsoft.com; live.com; msn.com; outlook.com; hotmail.co.uk; hotmail.at; hotmail.bs; hotmail.ca; hotmail.co.il; hotmail.com.ar; hotmail.com.au; hotmail.com.br; hotmail.com.tr; hotmail.de; hotmail.dk; hotmail.es; hotmail.fr; hotmail.it; hotmail.se; live.at; live.ca; windowslive.com; Cisco Ironport; Homebuilt; Microsoft.com Portal

Connection/throughput

Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) connections: 500

Throughput: 50 messages per connection

These can vary based on a sender's reputation.

Feedback loop (FBL) application

Outlook.com Feedback Loop application

Postmaster site

Postmaster

Policies and Sending Guidelines

Return Path partnership with Microsoft

In partnership with Return Path, Microsoft uses the Return Path Certification whitelist to give preferential treatment for Certified senders. Microsoft sends volume and complaint data to Return Path for use by Certified senders.

Return Path Certification gives senders a high probability of getting their email delivered directly to subscriber inboxes. However, Certified senders may see issues with email delivered to the junk folder at Outlook.com if complaint rates are high.

Public monitoring services and escalation

Outlook.com offersservices to help senders gain a good understanding of the type of traffic originating from their networks and reaching Outlook.com customers. Senders can use this data to help stop abusive activity, such as junk mail and phishing, in order to proactively manage sending reputation.

Junk Mail Reporting Program (JMRP) : Outlook.com's JMRP provides reports for email marked as junk or phishing by Outlook.com users.

Microsoft records a complaint when the subscriber clicks on the 'this is spam' button or if the subscriber moves the email directly to the spam or junk folder.

Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) : SNDSis a free service that provides high-level insight on how users rate the email they receive and the health of a sender's IP space. To receive complaint feedback through SNDS, senders should enroll at theJunk Mail Reporting Program (JMRP). Senders typically start receiving complaint feedback within SNDS in as little as 72 hours.

Microsoft Support : Senders in compliance with Microsoft's sending guidelines and encountering deliverability problems can submit a support request for help with troubleshooting.

Transactional email issubject to mailbox provider spam filters and require a good sending reputation to ensure inbox placement. Transactional email reaching the inbox is as important, and in some cases more important than bulk marketing email since there may be legal requirements, purchase information or important notifications involved.

Many of the benefits realized for marketing email are also realized for transactional email using Return Path's Email Optimization Suite.

Common types of transactional email

Receipts, order confirmations, shipping confirmations, password resets, legal notifications, policy updates, registration confirmation, abandoned shopping cart, and re-engagement.

How can I benefit most from Return Path tools and services with my transactional email?

Inbox Monitor

Sending transactional email to the seed list:

Identify all of the types of transactional emailssent to your subscribers.

Analyze the volume of your transactional emailssent throughout the day and week and look for times of higher volume.

During peak volume times, send a copy of your transactional emailto the seed list from your email system.

Set it up programmatically: Ask your Email Service Provider, email administrator or IT department to configure or program your sending system to deploy a copy of your transactional message to the seed list at a specific time of day or after every nth message. For example, after every 10,000 messages are sent to subscribers, message 10,001 is sent to the seed list. Be sure to set it up to stay within your message limit as outlined in your service agreement.>

Send a message manually: Using a transactional email template, enter in any personalization using fake subscriber information. Send that transactional email from your sending system to the seed list, similar to how you send a marketing email.

Send transactional email to the seed list at the same time as your marketing email to determine if your marketing email may be affecting the transactional email's performance.

Inbox Preview

Review the appearance of all transactional email templatesin Inbox Preview to ensure the template is free from HTML or design errors and that it is easily recognizable via the friendly-from address (display name) and branding.

When making changes to any transactional templates, test in Inbox Preview first.

Design with engagement in mind. Although you are sending a transactional email, it is a good ideato includeprominent calls-to-action to encourage the subscriber to engage with the email. Higher engagement contributes to a positive sender reputation and increases your chances of reaching the inbox.

Return Path Platform Sender Score

Monitor the sending reputation for your transactional IP addresses. Transactional emailsoften become an afterthought of an email program. Notifications and other transactional emails are oftensent to people who have no present relationship with your company and may not be interested in receiving your emails.

Sending transactional messages to unengaged subscribers or customers can lead to an increase in complaints, unknown users and spam traps.

If transactional emails share an IP address or domain with marketing messages, deliverability may be affected, especially if the marketing messages don’t adhere to sending best practices.

Including your transactional IP address in Return Path Platform Sender Score helps you to see correlating data between transactional and marketing email.

Email Client Monitor

Similar to marketing messages, it is important to know what email clients and devices are being used to open your transactional email. For example, should a large percentage of your email be opened using mobile devices, you will want to ensure that all of your transactional email templates are easily viewed on mobile devices.

Use custom tagging to help identify the different transactional templates and email segments.

Certification

Certify your transactional IP addresses and domains to help ensure important messages reach the recipient.

Many Return Path customers certify their transactional IP addresses and domains.

How does it benefit me?

Although transactional email is sent based on an action or trigger to a subscriber, it is perceived by mailbox providers no differently than bulk marketing email in terms of IP address and domain reputation. The Return Path Email Optimization Suite allows transactional senders to experience the same benefits as all Return Path clients with a robust email optimization platform infused with insightful and actionable data.

The world is getting smaller and sending to international subscribers is becoming an important part of many organizations’ email program. No matter where your country of origin is as a marketer, it’s important to do some research about the country you are planning on sending email to in the future. Not understanding local laws as well as customs could put you at risk for legal problems, poor performance, and hurt your brand image.

In order to help you send to international subscribers successfully, be sure to follow these best practices.

Language, culture and norms

Understand data collection and privacy laws. There may be strict laws on using opt-in or confirmed opt-in consent, as well as what data you can or cannot capture, and how or where the data is stored.

Consult your legal counsel to understand local laws

GDPR

CASL

CANSPAM

Determine your ability to offer support in different languages. If you send an email in French and the subscriber responds in French, will you be able to take care of that subscriber?

Ensure your localization services use native speakers that understand local dialects and the nuances of acceptable marketing communication for either B2C or B2B subscribers.

Research local norms and customs. Some content that is perfectly acceptable in your country may be perceived as an insult in another country. For example, a thumbs up gesture is acceptable in the United States but very insulting in the Middle East. This can also help you create better targeted content.

Ensure your brand name or product name has meaning when translated. You may need to change your branding or product name so that it can be understood.

Research the dates of holidays and popular vacation times for each region. This may help you promote your product or service or avoid costly campaigns sent during a time when people are traditionally not paying attention to their email account.

Email tips

Research content design tips for the region. People in a specific country may prefer more or less information about products within an email. People may also prefer different colors that have special meaning in their culture. For example, Japanese subscribers often prefer to see additional sales points for a product and prefer brighter colors such as red, yellow and green.

Use responsive design techniques. Many international subscribers prefer to view email on their mobile device.

Be mindful of time zones. Sending an email campaign to a region at 1:00 am in the morning may lead to lower or delayed engagement metrics. Also, in some countries, people tend to keep mobile notifications active during the night. Receiving an email during the night can lead people to negatively engage and mark emails as spam.

Offer language options during sign up. Allow subscribers to select their language preference from the start of the relationship.

Optimize your website. If you send emails in German and your landing pages and website are in English, it may lead to some frustration as well as jeopardize the sale with some international subscribers. Also, ensure your landing pages load quickly, especially when keeping a mobile audience in mind.

Ask your subscribers what languages are preferred. Send a survey to determine which languages are most important to them.

Use appropriate encoding standards. UTF-8 is a standard, but there may be other standards for a specific region.

Ensure your email copy is written using the correct characters. Accents and special characters in the wrong place may change the meaning of a word or phrase. Incorrect presentation of the language to the recipient could harm your brand image since, to some people, it may indicate you don’t care enough about their language to do it correctly.

Use appropriate emojis and emoticons. Using a specific emoji popular in your country in context with local slang or culture may or may not be understood or could be perceived differently in another country.

Research the mailbox providers you are sending to for that region. International mailbox providers may have best practices or sending requirements that you must meet in order to reach the inbox.

Taking care of the email weight (size) could make sense according to the average internet connection speed per country. The email loading time can be different according to the country. Focusing on the mobile networks and the percentage of mobile opens per country is also very important.

Some countries require to add a prefix to the email subject lines. In China, mass emailings must have the word “Ad” (in Chinese) in their subject line.

Test. A/B or multivariate testing should be done whether you send internationally or only send domestically. Because of differences in language, customs and norms, testing becomes an even more important part of your international sending strategy.

B2B senders face numerous deliverability challenges with mailbox providers. One of the main challenges faced is the number of 3rd party spam filters available in the marketplace that a company could use to filter your email. 3rd party spam filters also allow companies to customize the filter to fit their needs. One company may want aggressive spam filtering, which may place morelegitimate email in the spam folder. Another company may want less aggressive filtering, which may make it easier for your email to reach the inbox. You also have to navigate the spam filters provided by hosting companies such as Rackspace or GoDaddy as well as traditional B2C mailbox providers such as Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo!.

With all of the variety of spam filters to contend with, it places a lot of emphasis on you to follow email marketing best practices to increase your chances of reaching the inbox.

B2B best practices:

Follow all standard email marketing best practices, including:

Sign up with all available complaint feedback loops and suppress complainers

Authenticate all email with Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)

Immediately honor unsubscribe requests

Monitor your performance using Return Path Platform.

Send both promotional and transactional email to Return Path Platform. Transactional and marketing email that share IPs could affect each other, so monitoring inbox placement is important.

Segment transactional email and marketing email using different subdomains and IP addresses.

Don’t send B2B bulk marketing email from your corporate infrastructure. Sending bulk email from a system used for more day-to-day business communication puts that system at risk of obtaining a poor sending reputation. If poor sending practices are used for bulk B2B email, legitimate corporate communications may be at risk of being sent to the spam folder or getting blocked.

Use opt-in consent. Purchasing email lists and list harvesting from social networks such as LinkedIn are common B2B practices that result in deliverability problems. Ensure consent for receiving promotional email is obtained at all acquisition points.

Don’t assume consent is given by someone to receive promotional email because they attend a webinar, conference or download a whitepaper.

If direct consent is difficult to obtain due to other circumstances (such as receiving business cards at a conference), use a confirmed opt-in email that requires a link to be clicked on by the recipient prior to sending promotional email.

Identify buyer personas. Know who you are sending to and what their intentions are towards your business. Some recipients may attend a webinar purely for educational purposes and may have no ability to influence or decide on purchasing your product or service. Promotional emails in this case are a waste of your resources that could be spent targeting the right people.

Send email according to the prospect’s position in the buying cycle. Use lead scoring to help you send relevant emails to the right people.

Use personalization. Using a name is not enough. Try to obtain information about their position in the company and location to help design content that is right for them.

Use a branded friendly from name. Most people will delete or send an email to spam if they don’t recognize the sender. Using a person’s name in the friendly from name should be done either when a relationship with the recipient is established or if the brand is synonymous with the name, such as a founder (e.g. Richard Simmons, Dr. Oz)

Determine the proper voice and tone for your business. Do your recipients expect a more formal voice and tone (Mr. Smith) or is it more Casual (James). When trying to establish the relationship, the voice and tone can help you make that important connection.

Be mindful of coming across as too casual and personal to executives in the beginning of a relationship as some executives may prefer a more professional and formal tone until a relationship has been established.

Coordinate messaging across marketing channels. Reinforcing your marketing message across channels is great way to help prospects engage with you.

Ensure the subject line reflects the content of the message. People will quickly lose interest in your email or mark it as spam if it doesn’t deliver what is promised in the subject line.

Use responsive design. Many business professionals read email on their mobile device in addition to their desktop email client. Responsive design helps to ensure the content is displayed in a manner that encourages engagement.

Take full advantage of marketing automation tools available from your ESP. Transactional and triggered email can be very effective keeping your prospects and customers informed or notified about your products and services.

Test and review the trigger logic on any non user-generated triggered emails (e.g. birthdays, renewal notices, etc) on a regular basis. Triggered emails are often forgotten and may not always work properly as you grow your email program. These emails are often sent to people who are not engaged with your email, which can cause deliverability problems. Strong list hygiene practices are key for these messages to get good results.

Don’t forget about the landing page. Be sure the experience a prospect or customer has on your website reflects a professional appearance and provides relevant information.

Make it easy for someone to know where to go next to request a demo, request additional information or to gain access to your blogs, white papers, or other content offerings.

Ensure all forms are easy to fill out and don’t require a lot of time or ask for irrelevant information.

Ensure contact information is easy to find for those that may prefer speaking to a sales associate instead of navigating your website.

Include links to your social networks in all emails. Some business professionals may prefer to communicate with you using a social network.

Test. Use A/B or multivariate testing of different content and subject lines to determine what resonates best with your prospects and customers.

Choosing the best CRM software for your business is not easy. It is an important decision to make and there are numerous factors to consider so that you buy the right solution.

Choosing CRM software is broken down into four easy steps.

Assess your business needs

Research solutions

Test solutions

Decide on a solution

1. Assess your business needs

Don’t skip this part. Answering questions and discussing your needs internally helps you narrow down your options quickly. If you don’t have your own method for recording information, a simple spreadsheet works. It helps organize your thoughts and justify your decision to the executive team.

Create a spreadsheet and insert each question below into one cell within the first column. Enter your answers in the second column.

Enter the name of each CRM software solution you want to investigate (see the list below to help you get started) in the other columns.

As you start researching software, enter notes in each corresponding cell for each CRM software solution to make it easy to compare strengths and weaknesses.

Prioritize the questions based on importance to your business: high, medium, and low.

Business considerations

What are your business requirements and objectives?

What is your budget?

What are your company and staff growth projections?

How many people need it now?

Evaluate current processes - where are your process bottlenecks?

Can implementation and administration be handled by current staff or do you need to hire someone?

Do you want a cloud (SAAS) or on-premise solution?

Is building it in-house an option?

What are your required features?

Pipeline management, data quality management, forecasting, workflows, sales performance tracking, marketing automation, reporting and analytics, lead scoring, other?

Vendor

What is their industry experience?

Do they have a good reputation in the industry?

Are they financially viable?

Do they work with other companies in your industry?

Do they have local partners for international offices?

What customer service do you need and do they provide?

No-touch, low-touch, or a dedicated account representative?

Do they have consulting services available for custom projects?

What product support do you need and do they provide?

Help center, call-center, ticketed support, chat?

What product training do you need and do they provide?

Instructor-led, on-demand video, e-learning courses?

Is there a free trial available?

What are their pricing options?

Do their pricing options fit within your budget?

System

Do the features match your business needs?

How often are new features released?

Is it missing any of your required features?

Will the system scale to meet your future needs?

Is it user friendly?

Can it be customized?

Is it easy to administer?

What automation is available?

What kind of analytics and reporting are available?

Does it enable you to comply with major data and privacy laws such as the EU’s GDPR?

Can it integrate easily with your current systems or do you want it to replace what you currently use?

Does it have third party productivity apps or services available?

Is it mobile friendly?

Is it easily accessible from any location your employees may access the system?

How does the vendor communicate system issues and upgrades?

2. Research solutions

There are numerous CRM options available in the marketplace and below is a list of some of the top CRM vendors. As you start your search, look at companies that are financially viable and have a track record in the industry. New companies may not be financially viable and having them going out of business halfway through your contract could be disruptive to your business.

Be sure to record your notes if you created a spreadsheet.

Salesforce

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

SAP

Hubspot CRM

Zoho CRM

Freshsales

Insightly

For each solution, compare question results by priority outlined in step 1. Focus on high priority questions first and work your way down the list. It is likely that several vendors emerge as good candidates.

3. Test solutions

You should have enough information available to narrow your search to several vendors you think fit your business needs. Arrange for the free trial and test the functionality with your sales and marketing teams.

Get input from the people who will use the system. You can have the best CRM software in the world, but if your sales and marketing teams don’t use it, you won’t maximize the return on investment.

Continue to make notes on usability factors for each vendor to help narrow down your list of candidates.

4. Decide on a solution

You have done your due diligence and tested several CRM software solutions. For some of you, there will be a clear winner, while for others, you may have a top two list of vendors.

If you are still deciding between vendors, here are a few tips to help you make a decision:

Look at your business priorities.

Are there any “must-have” features that one CRM software has that another CRM software doesn’t have?

Does one CRM software cover more of your high and medium priority items than the other CRM software?

Consider any future features you might use.

CRM software with features you need a year from now might be a better option than CRM software that doesn’t currently have those features.

Make sure the vendor has tiered pricing for features based on your current needs.

Paying for features you won’t use is a waste of money.

Get the best deal.

If the vendors are essentially equal, let them know you are deciding between them and their competition and see which one gives you the best pricing.

Yes. B2B senders need to sign up for all available FBLs and suppress complainers from receiving future email. Subscriber complaints are an important indicator that helps enterprise spam filters determine if your email is legitimate or spam. Not suppressing subscribers that complain results in filtered or blocked email and may lead to fewer sales and decreased revenue. You can also use the complaint data to make improvements to your email program by understanding what content resonates best with your prospects and customers.

If you do not send to many consumer mailboxes (e.g. Yahoo!), it is recommended to sign up for all consumer FBLs as an insurance policy. Some consumer mailbox providers provide business hosting that use the same spam filters and complaint mechanisms.

Refer to List of all available complaint feedback loops (FBLs) for additional information.

As a B2B sender, it is a good idea to check the health of your IP and domain sending reputations at least once per month. It can help you understand how B2B security and spam filtering companies perceive your email.

The B2B security and spam filter sender reputation checks do not give detailed, root cause information about sending issues. Rather, they provide general IP or domain sending reputation results categorized as "high, medium, low", "good, neutral, poor", or "high risk, medium risk, low risk". Results are determined by collecting data from their customers and applying internal scoring methods.

A good sending reputation means you are more likely to reach the inbox, but there are no guarantees. Be sure to view the sending reputation results relative to your own internal performance metrics. Internal metrics may show opens, clicks, and conversions even with a poor sending reputation. However, those metrics are likely to improve as your sending reputation improves.

If you see poor sending reputation results, review your email program and ensure you follow B2B sending best practices.

For each service provider, enter your IP address or domain as directed.

Cisco IP & Domain Reputation Overview

Barracuda Central

Cyren IP Reputation Check

Trend Micro Email Reputation Services

Symantec IP Reputation Investigation

Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation IP Lookup

WatchGuard Reputation Authority

Google postmaster

Reputation data is for all Gmail andGSuite accounts.

Account sign up and activation required to see reputation results.

A Matching ID is a unique identifier assigned to each mailing that we use to track and report on your email.

Setting up a Matching ID

Your email may already have a unique identifier that Return Path can use as your Matching ID. This is usually the case when you send through an email service provider that already works with Return Path. If not, you’ll have to set one up. Your first step is to send an email to the seed list. Your account representative can check to see if your email already has a unique identifier that can be used as a Matching ID, and if so, there is nothing more you have to do. Your account representative will let you know what your Matching ID is, and you can also find it in the ID column of your Campaign Overview or Details pages.

If you don't already have a Matching ID in your messages, the best thing to do is to add a new header that matches our default matching ID. If you cannot add a header to your email messages, you can work with your account representative to identify a header and value that may be used, or you can add the Matching ID to the body of your email.

If you need to add a unique identifier for your Matching ID, follow these instructions:

Determine your Matching ID. The most important part of the Matching ID is the value and how it is used. The value of the Matching ID included in the message must be consistent, regardless of recipient, across all messages that you want to be tracked as a single seeded campaign. This means that a subscriber ID will not work.

Decide where you will put your Matching ID. It can be placed either in the header or body of email messages, but the header is recommended.

Format it correctly. The Matching ID pattern must include an identifier specific to your company, which is static, as well as the variable value which is assigned to the campaign. See below for direction and guidance on how to add Matching IDs to the header or body of the email.

Send a test campaign to the seed list. Make sure the unique text string that you used worked properly. Once you have added your Matching ID, we configure our system so that while we collect data, it looks for and pulls in your Matching ID.

Putting a Matching ID in the header

Matching IDs are implemented through the use of an X-header, which is a custom email header. Check your Mailing Transport Agent (MTA) or Email Service Provider (ESP) documentation for their requirements about adding an X-header to your outbound email.

The recommended syntax for the Matching ID X-header is explained below:

For the key or label portion of the X-header, use:

X-rpcampaign:

The recommended syntax for the X-rpcampaign ID value is:

****++++++++++

The asterisks represent alphabetical characters for your company name, such as acme for Acme Corporation. You may use between 2 and 90 upper or lower case characters. For example:

acme++++++++++

AcmeCorporation++++++++++

The plus symbols represent a numerical, globally unique ID, meaning that it is unique to your company and the specific campaign. Date and time is effective, so we recommend it, but it’s important that the Matching ID is the same for all emails in the campaign. Implement the date symbolically as yyyymmddhhmmss.You may use between 2 and 90 digits. For example:

acme20030812112803

The complete X-header Matching ID being added appears as:

X-rpcampaign: acme20030812112803

Important notes:

When implementing the date and time in the X- value, make sure it is formatted with 0 fills. For example, 09/01/2003 01:02:03, not 9/1/2003 1:02:03.

Hyphens, periods, and other special characters are not allowed.

You may include underscores in your matching ID only after the last alphabetical character. For example:

acme_20030812112803

acme_2003_0812_112803

Adding a Matching ID in the email body

If you cannot add the Matching ID in the email headers, you can add it to the body of the email. So the Matching ID doesn’t appear in the HTML, it should be implemented as a comment in the HTML section of the email.

The recommended syntax for the Matching ID text string is the same in the body and the header. To include it as an HTML comment, use the following syntax:

<!-- rpcampaign: acme20030812112803 -->

Underscores may be used to separate digits, but not alphabetical characters.

Overview

The Spamhaus Composite Snowshoe (CSS) blacklist uses proprietary data to identify IPs with low reputations that send snowshoe spam, or spam from compromised hosts. This blacklist is a component of the Spamhaus Block List (SBL).

Listings occur at the IP level.

The impact on deliverability is low.

Reasons for getting listed

IP addresses are listed for:

Sending email to Spamhaus spam traps

Deploying email from IP addresses across several different IP ranges or netblocks at a low volume

Sending email from a compromised system

Other indicators of low reputation or abuse as defined by Spamhaus

How to get off this blacklist

Removal is at the discretion of the Spamhaus team but usually occurs automatically 48 hours after the last receipt of spam.

You can request removal using the CSS Automatic IP Removal Form, but it is important you resolve the root cause of the listing before making the request. If you do not do this, future listings will be harder to get removed.

Multiple Spamhaus CSS listings may cause the IP to be listed on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL), which can cause serious deliverability problems.

Tips for staying off this list

Avoid changing sending IP addresses when you encounter delivery problems

Use confirmed opt-in

Grow your subscriber list organically with tactics such as website sign ups, SEO, and point of sale sign ups

Do not purchase or rent lists, or use other risky acquisition methods

Conduct ongoing list maintenance and list hygiene

Implement proper security measures to ensure your systems are not used to send spam from an unauthorized third party

This video gives you an overview of Return Path SmartSeeds.

*There has been an update to the seeding method, please refer to the following article to learn about the changes:

What are SmartSeeds

Follow this link if you want to learn more about the SmartSeeds Personas mentioned in this video:

Understanding SmartSeeds Personas

Your email program’s success depends on continually increasing your return on investment (ROI). One of the obvious ways to achieve this is by expanding your subscriber list. And as you might know, there are good and bad ways to do this, and good reasons for doing it right. These reasons include protecting your deliverability, reputation, and ultimately, growing your email ROI.

When you use poor list acquisition practices you will add more complaints, spam traps, unknown users, and unengaged subscribers to your list. These consequences will cause big deliverability and reputation issues. Your email can get blocked, delivered to the junk folder or blacklisted. Poor list acquisition practices ultimately result in less of your email reaching your subscribers’ inboxes. So, fewer subscribers are able to engage with your email, and your conversions and sales are negatively affected.

There are a few different ways you can acquire new subscribers. Here are the most common ones:

Organic list acquisition: Organic list acquisition includes a few different methods that involve having subscribers actively opt in to your email program. This is in contrast to non-organic methods where email addresses are added without subscribers knowing or giving their consent. Organic list acquisition methods include:

Website sign up

Transactional email message sign up

Retail and website point-of-sale sign up

Forward-to-a-Friend (FTAF)

Social media and SEO

Renting, purchasing or harvesting lists: These methods are not recommended because subscribers have not given permission to receive your email. Also, these lists often contain spam traps and unknown users. You may get lots of spam complaints from the addresses on these lists.

Co-registration and sharing lists with third parties: These are also risky methods if your partner uses a single check box for subscribers to sign up for multiple companies’ email lists. In that case, new subscribers may not realize they had signed up for multiple lists. This method can be successful, however, when it is clear to the subscriber what lists they are signing up for.

Using any of the recommended methods in combination with these best practices can help you get good engagement out of the new subscribers you add to your list.

Create a compelling opt-in form

Visibly place a link to your subscription form on your home page, internal pages, and point of sale.

Make your web subscription forms easy to use and intuitive, with a clear path to completion, and require subscribers to only provide relevant information.

Provide prospective subscribers with clearly stated benefits of opting in, which emails they will receive, and how frequently they will receive them.

Set expectations clearly about the type of content and the frequency of emails subscribers will receive.

Use solid permission practices

Require permission from all subscribers. Email addresses are subscribed only after address owners have given their explicit consent, receiving the strongest level of permissioning your audience will support.

Place a privacy policy prominently on your sign-up form. All website pages and email sign-up forms include a visible link to the company's privacy policy

Develop an effective confirmation page

Confirm the subscription and reiterate the benefits and set expectations

Prompt subscribers to add the sending address to their address book to ensure delivery to their inbox and provide whitelisting instructions.

Drive subscribers to your Preference Center to manage the emails they receive and the frequency.

Send a winning welcome message

Send an email confirming the subscription and reiterating the value right away.

Remind subscribers to whitelist your sending address and provide them with instructions.

Drive subscribers to your Preference Center to remind them where they can manage their email preferences.

Include an offer, and test different offers to identify the most effective one.

Have a solid testing plan

Track acquisition sources, such as point of sale, web and co-registration, to support testing.

Test new lists and acquisition sources to determine list quality and to identify poor sources.

Test data acquired from third parties and send from separate IPs to protect reputation.

Vet and audit your partners

If you acquire subscribers from third-party partners, ensure you test lists, segment data onto separate IPs. and audit their practices regularly to ensure the data does not affect your primary lists and IP reputation.

Test a sample of the file from a separate IP space and monitor unknown user rates before adding the file to your database.

Review the partner data file to ensure that you are not receiving incorrectly formatted addresses, such as those with missing @ symbols, spelling errors or periods in the domain, or role account addresses.

Segment partner lists onto a separate IP to monitor their ongoing data quality and unknown user rates. This will help you protect the deliverability of email you send to your primary subscriber list from any potential issues related to list quality issues of partner data.

Regularly audit your partner's sign-up process to ensure that it meets best practices for address collection.

Return Path products that can support this issue

Return Path Platform: Use Return Path Platform to look for major swings in deliverability and decreases in sending reputation. These may indicate a new list or list source is in use.

Certification: Use Certification to get spam trap, complaint, and unknown user rate data. These rates may show corresponding increases that can help when researching list-related issues

List hygiene is an important factor that impacts your sending reputation. Mailbox providers place email in the spam folder or block email from senders who do not adhere to goodlist hygiene practices.

Symptoms of poor list hygiene include blacklistings, spam trap hits, high complaint rates, and high unknown user rates.

Where to get supporting data

The following data sources can help you evaluate your list hygiene:

Return Path's Real-time Email Validation

Return Path Platform

Return Path's Certification program

Microsoft's Smart Network Data Services (SNDS)

Delivery Log Analysis (DLA)

Best practice recommendations

Sign up for all available feedback loops and promptly remove subscribers who complain.

Remove unknown user addresses after the first bounce.

Rejectmalformed addresses such as [email protected] at all points ofcollection.

Remove malformed email addresses from your list file; such as [email protected] or [email protected].

Prohibit the use of role accounts such as postmaster@, abuse@, or sales@ to sign up for your email program.

Consider using a list cleaning service to help identify invalid email addresses.

Implement a strategy for identifying and segmenting inactive subscribers. This can include changing the frequency you send to your inactive subscribers, sending them a win-back campaign, or, if necessary, removing them from your list entirely.

Ensure subscribers are able to update their email address, either through a preference center or Email Change of Address (ECOA)service.

Offer a global unsubscribe option and allow subscribers to unsubscribe from specific email streams via a preference center.

Ensureaddresses are segmented or flagged by source if you obtain email addresses from a third party. This can help you identify sources of invalid and risky email addresses.

Listed below are common reasons spam traps are on your email list:

You have a security breach in your network and a spammer has gained control of your list file.

You have an infrastructure problem that is creating backscatter, or bounce messages sent to an address that was falsely placed in an email's Return-Path. The email's fake Return-path address may be a spam trap.

You are harvesting addresses or receiving addresses from partners who practice list harvesting.

You have poor list hygiene or are receiving addresses from partners with poor list hygiene.

Inactive subscribers have been turned into recycled spam traps by mailbox providers.

You are purchasing email addresses from a list broker.

A typo spam trap is an email address with a misspelled domain name. For example:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

Typo spam traps are used by mailbox providers and blocklist providers to identify senders with poor list acquisition and list hygiene practices.

Sender reputation is the method mailbox providers use to measure the trustworthiness of a sender's email. It is composed of domain and IP address reputation, and is determined by mailbox providers based on a variety of metrics, including complaint rate, unknown user rate, volume, spam trap hits, engagement, and blacklistings. Mailbox providers place a high priority on a sender's reputation when determining inbox or spam folder placement of emails.

Most common components of sender reputation

Complaints

List quality, including spam traps and unknown users

Infrastructure and authentication

Content

Sending history

Engagement

IP permanence

Why reputation matters

Sender reputation is important to any business that uses email to achieve goals such as increasing revenue, website, or store traffic; improving customer satisfaction and retention; communicating details of a transaction; and building brand awareness.

The key to achieving these goals is to get email delivered to the inbox, so subscribers can open them and take action. Email marketers with a good sender reputation will see higher inbox placement rates, and those with a poor sender reputation will often see their email get blocked or delivered to the spam folder.

A Sender Score is a numerical representation of your sending reputation. Sender reputation is determined by measuring your performance across key metrics that are important to mailbox providers and email subscribers. These metrics are intended to help senders understand how legitimate and welcome their email is to their own subscribers.

How Sender Score works

You send an email campaign to your subscribers. A Sender Score is assigned to each IP address you send from.

Sender Scores are based on a scale of 0-100, with 0 being the worst and 100 being the best.

The Return Path Provider Network captures your reputation metrics that make up a Sender Score. The Provider Network is powered by mailbox providers, spam filtering companies, and spam trap networks. It also includes more than 100 million mailboxes and millions of unique IP addresses.

Depending on how you perform against the different reputation metrics, your Sender Score fluctuates.

Your reputation metrics are displayed in your Return Path account for you to understand why your Sender Score may have increased or decreased.

How your Sender Score is calculated

Return Path generates Sender Scores using a proprietary algorithm that takes into account a wealth of data within Return Path's Provider Network as described above.

The Sender Score algorithm reviews more than 100 variables before configuring your score.

Here are the different reputation metrics that comprise your Sender Score:

Complaint rate

Message filtered rate

Infrastructure

Sending volume

Sender rejected rate

Unknown user rate

Spam trap hits

A spam trap is an email address or server specifically designed, maintained, and monitored to catch abusive email traffic.

While spam traps may be thought of as a mechanism for capturing spam emails, a M3AAWG paper on best practices for creating and operating spam traps defines a spam trap as "a honeypot used to capture any kind of email abuse." This could be spam, phishing, malware, or other abusive bot activity.

Types

There are two types of spam traps:

Pristine spam traps, also referred to as true traps, have never been used as a legitimate email address. These addresses generally trap the worst spammers who engage in email address harvesting and other illegal practices.

Recycled spam traps, sometimes called re-purposed spam traps, are addresses that were at one time legitimate destination addresses that have been re-purposed to catch abusive email. These addresses can also trap legitimate marketers with weak data-quality practices.

Orange (formerly France Telecom S.A.) is a global telecommunications company headquartered in Paris, France. With about 43\% market share, Orange is the most widely used broadband provider in France. Its reach extends internationally, since close to 44\% of its customers are located outside of France. In France, Orange has 13 million active email accounts.

Infrastructure

Region

Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA): France

Domains

Orange.fr; wanadoo.fr

Connection/throughput

Senders should open no more than three simultaneous connections, but Return Path Certification senders can open ten. Senders must respect their resources or throttling will occur. There is no connection limit per hour for senders participating in Return Path's Certification program. All non-certified senders have a limit of 5000 connections per hour for each IP address. Return Path recommends 100 messages per connection.

Feedback loop (FBL) application

Orange uses an FBL operated by Signal Spam. Senders participating in Return Path’s Certification program receive Signal Spam FBL data in the Daily Performance Report and within the Certification user interface.

Postmaster site

No Postmaster site

Return Path partnership with Orange

In partnership with Return Path, Orange uses the Return Path Certification whitelist for preferential treatment, including increased connections and spam filter tolerance.

Orange delivery mediation

Orange has a public escalation process to investigate delivery problems and remove blocks. Prior to escalating your delivery problem, ensure you are following their best practice guidelines and have made an effort to identify and fix the cause of your delivery issue.

Write to [email protected] describing exactly what delivery issues you are experiencing. Be sure to provide as much detail as possible including your company name, domains, IP addresses, subject lines and error codes and timestamps.

Return Path guidance

Return Path understands Orange well and may have data to diagnose deliverability issues.

Enrolling in feedback loops (FBLs) is an important deliverability best practice, allowing you the opportunity to remove or suppress subscribers from your list who no longer wish to receive your email. This helps you manage spam complaint rates, which is an important reputation metric that mailbox providers use to decide whether they will deliver your email to the inbox, spam folder or if they will block your email.

Save time setting up and managing Return Path hosted complaint feedback loops by using our Universal Feedback Loop. Return Path's Universal Feedback Loop is a single FBL management tool to simplify the configuration process and coordinate subscriptions in one location.

Or, you can apply to specific Return Path hosted complaint feedback loops (FBL) below.

BAE Systems (USA.net)

Bluetie/Excite

Comcast

Cox

Fastmail

LaPoste.net

Libero (Italiaonline)

Liberty Global (Chello, UPC, and UnityMedia) (use the Universal Feedback Loop to apply)

Locaweb

Mail.ru

OpenSRS/Hostedmail (Tucows)

Rackspace

Seznam (use the Universal Feedback Loop to apply)

Synacor

Telenor(use the Universal Feedback Loop to apply)

Telstra (use the Universal Feedback Loop to apply)

Terra

UOL

Virgilio(use the Universal Feedback Loop to apply)

XS4ALL

Yandex

There are other FBL services available, but these FBLs are not provided by Return Path.

Verizon Media (AOL and Yahoo!)

Earthlink

Gmail

Complaints are not sent in ARF format and the data is more valuable for high volume senders

Sign up with Gmail Postmaster tools to view feedback loop data

Outlook.com (Hotmail)

QQ (Tencent)

Zoho

Please view our updated Certification requirements document here:

Certification Requirements

This document is being provided for informational purposes only. Nothing in this document shall be construed as creating a representation, legal advice, warranty or commitment, contractual or otherwise, by Return Path, Inc., or any affiliate of Return Path, to you or any other person or entity. It also does not guarantee that your email and/or any other aspect of your business is in compliance with state, federal, or International laws. Return Path makes no representation, warranty or commitment that any message you send to end users will be delivered. This document is not a substitute for, should not be used in place of, and should not be considered, legal advice. It is recommended that you contact your general or legal counsel.

What is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?

The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is the European Economic Area (EEA) regulation adopted on May 24, 2016 with a goal to harmonize, modernize and strengthen data privacy and processing policies across Europe. GDPR replaces Directive 95/46/EC (the ‘Data Protection Directive’) which is out of date due to evolving technology standards.

GDPR requirements will be enforced starting on May 25, 2018. It requires organizations to diligently protect personal data, as well as provide proof about how that data is protected.

GDPR sets a high standard for consent, which will have a huge impact on the marketing industry. Customers will need to be given choice and control over how their data is handled. To comply, you’ll need to know how the GDPR defines personal data, where it’s located in your business, how it’s used, who can access it, and much more.

Does the GDPR affect you?

The GDPR affects ANY business that collects, processes, stores, and uses data from people residing in the EEA. It affects you whether your organization has EEA headquarters or not, or if the processing itself takes place in or outside of the EEA. This means that whether you have European headquarters, or if you are only a firm with offices or customers in Europe, you need to adopt new practices to ensure full compliance with this regulation.

Marketing teams will be the first to be affected by these new changes, as they are one of the main players when it comes to data processing. Your data collection and processing strategies will have to be unambiguous and communicated to all users and subscribers.

You may also have to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO), who will be responsible for informing and advising the person in charge of your data processing, as well as monitoring your company's compliance with the new regulation.

What information is considered as personal data?

The GDPR defines personal data as "any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual". So, any information capable of directly identifying a person, or having been cross-linked with other data, will be considered as constituting personal data.

What are the GDPR’s key concepts?

Below are some of the key concepts that come with the new regulation. However, this is not an exhaustive list, and updates are expected in the future to the GDPR since this is the first major change to data protection regulations in more than 20 years. Consult your legal counsel for the most recent updates.

Territorial scope: The GDPR applies to all companies processing personal data of people residing in the EEA, regardless of the company’s location. The GDPR also applies to the processing of personal data of people residing in the EEA by a controller or processor not established in the EEA, where the activities relate to:

Offering goods or services (irrespective of whether payment is required).

The monitoring of behavior that takes place within the EEA.

Penalties and fines: Organizations violating the GDPR can be fined up to 4\% of annual global revenue or 20 Million Euros (whichever is greater). This is the maximum fine that can be imposed for not having sufficient customer consent to process data or by violating the core privacy concepts.

Consent: Consent requirements are strong. You must use terms that are easily understood and not use long, illegible terms and conditions full of complex legal words and expressions. The request for consent must be given in clear and unambiguous form, and organizations may need to adopt new consent policies such as:

Consent must be specific to distinct purposes. Consent cannot be implied or inferred for multiple purposes.

Pre-checked boxes do not constitute sufficient consent.

Organizations processing personal data of children under the age of 16 (member-states may independently drop the age of consent to 13) must acquire consent from the child’s parent.

The opt-out process must be as simple and straightforward as the opt-in process.

Organizations must provide documented and verifiable consent at any time. It is essential that the data controller keep track of:

The mechanisms used to obtain consent (e.g. online forms, or an affirmative opt-in via a cookie).

The purpose of using the data.

The opt-in date.

People residing in the EEA gain new rights; the most important being:

The right to be forgotten: Organizations must have means in place to locate and delete all of an individual’s data upon request, including in circumstances where a controller may have passed the data downstream to a secondary controller or processor.

The right to object: Individuals can reject how an organization uses their data for specific purposes, such as marketing profiling.

The right to rectification: Individuals can have incomplete or incorrect data completed or corrected.

The right of access: Individuals have the right to know what and how specific data elements are being collected and processed.

The right to data portability: Individuals have the right to transmit their data (or request it to be done on their behalf) from one organization to another, without any restrictions or undue delay.

Personal data breach reporting: Personal data breaches with the data controller are to be reported to the local Supervisory Authority (established within each EEA member state) within 72 hours. If the personal data breach also represents a high risk to the individual, the controller must communicate the personal data breach to the individual immediately. If the data breach is with the data processor, the data processor must inform the data controller immediately.

Privacy notices: Organizations must transparently state their approach to personal data protection in a privacy notice. People also have the right to receive ‘fair and lawful’ information about the processing of their data in the privacy notice, among other things:

Contact details of the data controller and the Data Protection Officer.

How the data is used (e.g. details of data transfers outside of the EEA).

Purpose of the data: This must be as specific and minimized as possible (purpose limitation and data minimization).

How long the data is retained: This period must be as short as possible (storage limitation).

Expanding the definitions of personal and sensitive data: The definitions of personal and sensitive data have been expanded and include genetic and biometric data. The GDPR enforces a strict definition of personal data as “any information that could be used, on its own or in conjunction with other data, to identify an individual.”

Privacy by default and design: Organizations must consider data privacy at the initial design stages of a project as well as throughout the lifecycle of the relevant data processing.

Data controller and data processor: The data controller and data processor are responsible for implementing appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure and to demonstrate that its processing activities are compliant with the requirements of the GDPR. The data controller must also ensure each data processor it works with has the appropriate measures in place.

What effect will GDPR have on deliverability?

Deliverability is influenced by hundreds of factors related to your sending reputation, including the quality of your subscribers. With the increased focus on unambiguous, informed consent that GDPR has for organizations sending to people residing in the EEA, deliverability may improve at some European mailbox providers.

The more you send email to people who give express consent to receive your email, the more likely they will engage with your email. Since engagement is a factor used by many mailbox providers when filtering your email, higher engagement rates (and fewer complaints) could lead to higher inbox placement at some European mailbox providers.

Where can you go for additional information about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?

EUGDPR.org

The UK's Information Commissioner’s Office

The Direct Marketing Association

CNIL

This document is being provided for informational purposes only. Nothing in this document shall be construed as creating a representation, legal advice, warranty or commitment, contractual or otherwise, by Return Path, Inc., or any affiliate of Return Path, to you or any other person or entity. It also does not guarantee that your email and/or any other aspect of your business is in compliance with state, federal, or International laws. Return Path makes no representation, warranty or commitment that any message you send to end users will be delivered. This document is not a substitute for, should not be used in place of, and should not be considered, legal advice. It is recommended that you contact your general or legal counsel.

Return Path is committed to complying with the GDPR and global privacy laws. In order to prepare for this new regulation, we have implemented the following:

Global privacy law compliance: Return Path currently complies with global privacy laws through the implementation of Model Contract Clauses as well as our membership in the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield. Our privacy team has spent the last year and a half preparing to comply with the GDPR.

Privacy by design: As part of its GDPR project, Return Path is enhancing its ongoing commitment to privacy by design. Privacy by design as a concept has existed for years now, but it is only just becoming part of a legal requirement with the GDPR.

At its core, privacy by design calls for the inclusion of data protection from the onset of the designing of systems, rather than an addition. More specifically - 'The controller shall..implement appropriate technical and organizational measures..in an effective way.. in order to meet the requirements of this Regulation and protect the rights of data subjects'.

Article 23 calls for controllers to hold and process only the data absolutely necessary for the completion of its duties (data minimization), as well as limiting the access to personal data to those needing to act out the processing.

Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs): We are working to embed data protection principles even more deeply into our business processes using PIAs, with the objective of limiting the amount and use of data from our consumer panel to what is minimally required.

Privacy council: We created a group of internal stakeholders from across the organization in order to help us educate teams on privacy rules, confirm implementation of required practices, and ensure that we have top down/bottom up buy-in for our privacy program.

Privacy mission statement and operations: We have internal data handling policies in place as well as a Privacy Operations Manual, and a formalized charter and mission statement in order to express our commitment to compliance. They include our objectives, key performance indicators (KPIs) and obligations to the organization, our clients, and our partners.

Clear and concise opt-in: We are always working on improving our commitment to our clients and visitors to our sites through simple, easy to read policies and clear consent and opt-in practices.

Organizational guidelines and compliance: We are working closely with our legal department, marketing, product groups, and human resources to ensure that guidelines are being closely followed and that we have the necessary pieces in place to achieve and maintain compliance.

If you have questions or would like more details, please feel free to reach out to us directly at [email protected].

*The information in this article about the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is not and should not be considered legal advice. Please consult your legal counsel to determine its impact on your company and your email program.

With increased technology innovations for gathering and sharing personal data through social networks, mobile apps, search engines, and online commerce, the potential for misuse of personal data has increased dramatically. In order to increase the personal data privacy protections for California residents, the California legislature passed the CCPA on June 28, 2018.

Key points

CCPA text

Date the law is enforced: January 1, 2020.

Penalties: Failure to comply with the CCPA can result in penalties up to $7500 (USD) for each violation.

Changes to the CCPA: Amendments to the CCPA may occur prior to the enforcement date. Be sure to consult your legal counsel for details about any amendments to the law.

What is the CCPA?

The CCPA is a state law that gives California (United States) residents more control over the use of their personal information. It is similar to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

With this law, California residents have the right to:

Know what personal information is being collected about them

Know whether their personal information is sold or disclosed and to whom

Say no to the sale of personal information

Access their personal information

Equal service and price, even if they exercise their privacy rights

How does it impact me?

Any company that processes data for California residents must comply with the CCPA if they meet one or more of these three thresholds:

Annual gross revenues of $25 million (USD). The CCPA does not specify that the revenue must only be generated in California.

The company obtains personal information from 50000 or more California residents, households, or devices annually

50 percent or more annual revenue is derived by the company from selling California residents’ personal information

Should your company meet the requirement for compliance, you must take action to allow California residents control of their personal information as outlined within the law by January 1, 2020.

Be sure to consult your legal counsel to determine what changes are required to comply with the law.

You may be required to:

Change your privacy policy

Change your terms of use agreement

Collect more information about where your customers live

Keep better records about how personal data is collected

Keep better records about to whom the personal data is sold

Allow a Californiaresident the ability to opt-out of the sale of their data

Include a link on your website to make the opt-out process easy

Be prepared to respond to a verifiable request for personal information free of charge within 45 days of the request date

Change your consent process for a minor child

*The information in this article about Brazil's new data protection law, LGPD or Lei Geral de Proteo de Dados, is not and should not be considered legal advice. Please consult your legal counsel to determine its impact on your company and your email program.

Brazil’s new data protection law, LGPD or Lei Geral de Proteo de Dados,was unanimously approved by the National Congress, and sanctioned by Brazil's President on August 14, 2018. The effective date for enforcement is August 15, 2020.

Key points

LGPD text:

Brazilian Portuguese

English

Amendment:

Provisional measure 869/18

Date the law is enforced:

August 15, 2020.

Penalties for non-compliance:

Fine of 2 percent of the total revenue of the latest financial year limited to R$ 50 million (approximately US$ 12-13 million)

This can be applied daily or by infraction

Changes to the LGPD:

Amendments to the LGPD may occur prior to the enforcement date. Be sure to consult your legal counsel for details about any amendments to the law.

What is the LGPD?

The LGPD is a law that gives Brazilian residents more control over the use of their personal information. It is similar to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

With this law, Brazilian residents have the right to:

Confirmation of the existence of data processing

Access the data

Correct data that is incomplete, inaccurate, or out-of-date

Anonymize, block, or delete unnecessary or excessive data or data that is not processed in compliance with the LGPD

Portability of data to another service or product provider with express consent

Delete personal data processed with consent from the data subject

Information about public and private entities with which the controller has shared data

Information about the possibility of denying consent and the consequences of denial

Revoke consent

Source: GDPR vs LGPD ; GDPR.eu

How does it impact me?

LGPD applies to any individual or organization (physical presence in Brazil not required):

Collecting or processing personal data of Brazilian residents

Offering or providing goods and services to Brazilian residents

Should you or your company meet the requirement for compliance, you must take action as outlined within the law by August 15, 2020.

You may be required to:

Hire a Data Protection Officer or outsource the role to a third-party

Implement a process to notify Brazilian authorities of a data breach

Change your method of obtaining consent for email marketing communications

Change your privacy policy

Change your terms of use agreement

Collect more information about where your customers live

Keep better records about how personal data is collected

Keep better records about to whom the personal data is sold

Provide a free and easy opt-out process

Be prepared to respond to a verifiable request for personal information (e.g. deleting the data) free of charge within 15 days of the request date

Be sure to consult your legal counsel to determine what changes are required to comply with the law.

As a Certification member, you are expected to stay within your thresholds for the Certification compliance metrics outlined below, by following industry best practices for complaints, spam traps, Microsoft Sender Reputation Data (SRD), and blacklistings.

Compliance thresholds for certifieddomains

Microsoft Complaint Rate Threshold

(30 Day Average)

All Sending Volumes

.4\%

Microsoft SRD Rate Threshold

(30 Day Average)

50\% with 5 Junk Votes

Comcast Complaint Rate Threshold

(30 Day Average)

All Sending Volumes

0.3\%

Spam Trap Thresholds

(30 Day Cumulative)

3 Critical Trap Hits

5 Significant Trap Hits

Blacklist Thresholds

(Current Listing)

1 Critical Listing

2 Significant Listings

Smart Compliance is how the Certification program manages whitelisting benefits at our mailbox provider partners.

Below are the mailbox providers that offer deliverability benefits:

Yahoo!

Microsoft

Global providers (all other mailbox providers and data partners)

Depending on your compliance at these mailbox providers, you will receive:

Full benefits: Your IP address is compliant at all mailbox providers and receives deliverability benefits at each one

Partial benefits, partial suspension: Your IP is non-compliant at one mailbox provider. The non-compliant IP will lose deliverability benefits at that specific mailbox provider but still receive deliverability benefits at the remaining mailbox providers.

You may receive aGlobal Suspension. A Global Suspension means that you have lost deliverability benefits at all mailbox providers excluding Yahoo! and Microsoft.

No benefits, full suspension: Your IP is non-compliant at two or more mailbox providers. The non-compliant IP will lose deliverability benefits for all mailbox providers.

A partially or fully suspended IP will remain suspended until it becomes compliant at each of the impacted mailbox providers.

It can sometimes be difficult to know where to start when you see deliverability problems. Whether the deliverability problems are widespread or focused on only a few mailbox providers, these tips can help you determine a cause.

Initial troubleshooting steps

Determine the scope of the deliverability problems

Are the problems:

Forone campaign or for all campaigns?

Fora specific IP address or domain or all IP addresses or domains?

Only for your promotional campaigns or do they only affect transactional or other triggered messages?

Fora specific email stream such as a newsletter or product line?

Occurring on a specific day or time of day?

Forjust one mailbox provider, or do you see similar problems at other mailbox providers?

Fora specific segment of subscribers or all subscribers?

Fora specific brand you own or all brands?

For a specific email template or content?

Determine if your IP addresses are on Blacklists

If your IP address or domain is listed on a blacklist, refer to the Blacklist’s listing criteria and fix the cause. Return Path Platform alerts you to blacklist issues but you can also check your SMTP logs for error codes and descriptions indicating a blacklisting. Not all Blacklists are created equally as many of them are minor and have little to no effect to your deliverability. Important blacklists such as Spamhaus, Spamcop, URIBL and SURBL can have the biggest negative impact to your inbox placement if your IP or domain is listed. Typical reasons for being blacklisted are because of a high number of complaints and sending to spam traps.

Check your SMTP logs for clues regarding the issue

If your email is being throttled or blocked, check your SMTP logs for a response code indicating a possible cause. Many mailbox providers provide a response code, a short description and a link to their postmaster page you can use to troubleshoot. If you use an Email Service Provider (ESP), ask them if they have a report you can run that lists these response codes.

Check your sending processes

Ensure the complaint handling process is working and complainers are added to a suppression list. Be sure you are signed up with all available complaint feedback loops.

Ensure the bounce processing process is working and unknown users are suppressed or removed after one bounce.

Immediately honor all unsubscribe requests to ensure future email messages are not marked as spam.

Additional troubleshooting tips

Ensure your IP is configured with a valid reverse DNS record: Your IP address needs a valid, non-generic reverse DNS (PTR) record pointing to a domain. A missing or generic (in-addr.arpa) reverse DNS record can cause deliverability issues.

Determine if you in compliance with sending best practices:If you are having issues at one or more mailbox providers, make sure you are in compliance with their suggested sending best practices. If you need to use their public escalation process, they may be more likely to be helpful if you are following their best practices. Otherwise you may just get a generic response from their support team that points you to their best practices web page.

Check Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) data:Microsoft’s SNDS data is free and provides data on complaints and spam traps for Microsoft domains. Even if you are not encountering delivery issues at Microsoft, SNDS complaint and spam trap data may help point you in the right direction.

Look for spikes in your data:Large, sudden increases in complaints, unknown users, spam traps and unsubscribe requests along with declining response metrics can help you pinpoint potential causes for deliverability problems.

Determine if you increased the frequency of email sent to subscribers:If you started sending more frequently for the latest holiday or just in general, it could be leading to more complaints, unsubscribes, lower engagement rates and more messages that are deleted without being read. You may need to send less frequently in order to optimize the frequency of email sent to your subscribers.

Check your Certification data:If you participate in Return Path’s Certification Whitelist program, the data can be useful in identifying potential causes of your deliverability problems.

Review your list acquisition and list hygiene processes: Spam traps are an important reputation measure for many mailbox providers. Most mailbox providers will bounce back inactive addresses as unknown users for 3-9 months before a recycled spam trap is created.

Find outif you recently acquired email addresses from a higher risk source such as a list purchase or e-append and stop sending to those email addresses. If you have a co-registration partner, you may want to temporarily stop sending to addresses acquired from them until you can verify that the email addresses opted in to your email program.

Look for large spikes in the number of new subscribers over the past 90 days. If you average 100 new subscribers a day and you see that number suddenly spike up to 1000 over a few days, it may indicate list poisoning. Suppress those email addresses until you can verify they are real subscribers.

Ensure your list hygiene plan is working as expected. If you don’t have a plan, you should create one that makes sense for your business. Sending to a large number of subscribers that don't engage with your email can cause deliverability problems.

Determine if your content contains a spammy Cloudmark fingerprint : Many mailbox providers use Cloudmark in their filtering decisions. After identifying and fixing the cause for the spammy fingerprint, submit a reset request. If you don’t fix the cause of the issue, your content is likely to be marked with a spammy fingerprint in the future.

Determine if you sent a large volume of email in a short period of time: Large volume spikes may be perceived as spam. If it was a one-time event, monitor performance over the next few days to see if deliverability normalizes. Spread out future large volume sends over time to avoid being perceived as a spammer.

Determine if you sent to a suppression list:If you did send to a suppression list, your performance should normalize as your metrics return to normal levels. Many senders send to a suppression list by accident, but some senders send to a suppression list to try and re-engage old subscribers, which usually results in deliverability problems.

Determine if you are sending from a new IP address or domain: Many deliverability problems occur when a new IP address or domain is not warmed up properly. If you did warm up the IP address and domain properly or are in the process of warming them up, you may still encounter deliverability issues while your sending reputation is built. It is important to note that sending success from a new IP or domain is closely tied to the quality of data you have. If you have highly engaged subscribers, you are more likely to be perceived as a legitimate sender. If your subscribers do not engage with you often, you are more likely to be perceived as a spammer.

Determine if your email authentication is working properly: A misconfigured SPF, DKIM or DMARC record can result in email being filtered or blocked. Check for the “Authentication-results” in your email headers using Inbox Monitor to determine if there are any verification failures. Return Path’s Smart Alerts can also help you identify verification failures and give instructions to fix the issues. A DMARC record with a p=quarantine or p=reject policy flag can cause spam folder placement or rejected messagesfrom your domain if SPF and DKIM are failing verification.

Check your connection and throughput settings:Mailbox providers will throttle your email if you are sending too much email to their servers. Reduce the connection and throughput settings if throttling occurs.

Check your retry settings: Increase the time between retries if experiencing throttling issues. You may want to limit the number of retries per message to 2 or 3 temporarily if needed until you can isolate a cause of the deliverability problems.

Check your content: Although most deliverability problems are due to sending reputation factors, many mailbox providers still factor content in to their filtering algorithms.

Run you content through Inbox Preview and make sure it is rendering properly across all of the email clients. Improperly rendered campaigns may lead to lower response rates and higher complaints.

If you send one big image with no text in the message body, then try increasing the amount of text in the message body to have greater balance of text to image.

Ensure all URLs link to a valid web page, are not broken and don't send someone to a website hosting malware.

Avoid using link shorteners like bit.ly as these domains consistently show up on blacklists.

If you copied code from Microsoft Word or Publisher, you may have extra HTML code that is triggering a flag at the mailbox provider.

Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) is the rate of emails that were delivered to the inbox rather than the spam or junk folder.

You can calculate your IPR by dividing the number of emails delivered to the inbox by the total number of emails sent.

Domain warming is the way you establish a sending reputation for a new domain, or a domain that has not been used to send email recently. The warm-up process involves sending email from the new domain starting with small volumes, and gradually increasing the volume of email each day or week according to a set schedule.

Mailbox providers are suspicious of email coming from a domain that has no sending reputation or that has an unfamiliar sending pattern. They have to protect their customers from spam, so they will block or bulk large volumes of email from a new domain because it is most often coming from spammers.

Warming a domain develops your domain's identity and sending reputation, which helps gain the mailbox providers’ trust.

Read the How to warm up a domain article for more details.

Overview

The Barracuda Reputation Block List (BRBL) lists IP addresses of servers that are poorly configured or that have sent email or viruses to spam traps.

Listings occur at the IP address level.

The impact on deliverability is generally low. However, the impact may increase if you send more B2B email.

Reasons for getting listed

The BRBL automatically lists IP addresses with open relays, open proxies, or that send spam or viruses to Barracuda’s pristine spam traps. Once spam or viruses are detected, IP addresses are listed automatically and immediately .

If an IP address passes these basic tests, the email is then scored against the Barracuda Reputation System. This system, which is comprised of shared data from other Barracuda anti-spam appliances, generates a score that indicates how likely the message is spam. If the message is considered spam, the sender's IP address is added to the BRBL.

How to get off this block list

Barracuda accepts requests to remove IP addresses at its website. However, if the underlying cause of being blacklisted isn’t fixed, the IP address will likely be relisted.

Tips for staying off this list

Check your servers for open relays and open proxies

Don’t purchase email lists

Don’t use list harvesting techniques such as web scraping or spambots

Use opt-in or confirmed opt-in permission methods for all new subscribers

Consistently use list hygiene best practices

Make sure your email program complies with CAN-SPAM Act requirements

What is Microsoft’s Focused Inbox?

Focused Inbox is a feature included in Microsoft email products that allows users to separate important and less important email into two different tabs - Focused and Other. It uses machine learning and a user’s engagement actions to learn what email the user considers important. Email from senders with high engagement are considered Important and are placed in the Focused tab. Messages from senders deemed less important are placed in the Other tab.

Because Focused Inbox’s functionality is based on the user’s specific actions with a sender’s email, it places a great amount of importance for senders to:

Use confirmed opt-in or opt-in consent

Send relevant content that the recipient wants to receive

Have strong list hygiene practices in place to suppress non-responders

How does it affect deliverability?

The impact to deliverability is currently unknown. However, there is anecdotal evidence from some senders that there is a correlation with a decrease in engagement rates.

How many Microsoft users have this function turned on?

There is no industry data currently that reports usage statistics. All versions of Outlook that receive feature updates will soon become Focused Inbox capable (e.g., Office 365 versions of Office 2016 for Windows or Mac, Outlook on the web, the Outlook apps for iOS, Android, the Windows Phone, and Windows 10 Mail). Users will see Focused Inbox once their mailbox is enabled for it. If users are using an Office 365 email account in an enterprise, their email administrator might have disabled Focused Inbox.

It is likely that Microsoft’s Focused Inbox is not enabled for every user.

What do you do if you see a decrease in Microsoft engagement metrics?

Apply to Return Path's Certification Whitelist. If accepted, you'll receive preferential treatment at Microsoft.

Monitor your performance in Return Path Platform to see if there are other factors related to deliverability that could be impacting engagement. Microsoft uses numerous data points in their filtering decisions and a decrease in engagement may be due to other factors.

Follow Microsoft’s Best Practice recommendations.

Use confirmed opt-in or opt-in consent methods.

Look at your sign up process and see if there is an opportunity to implement a preference center and to improve your disclosure about what email the subscriber will receive. Subscribers are more likely to engage with email they choose to receive.

Send out a survey asking subscribers what content is working and where you can improve.

Have a strategy in place to suppress non-responders. Look at your data to determine if there is a time when subscribers stop engaging with your email and send them a win-back campaign. If the non-responders don’t engage with the win-back campaign, add them to your suppression list.

Perform A/B or multivariate testing on different subject lines, content, and offers to determine how to improve engagement metrics.

Add an optional survey during your unsubscribe process asking why the subscriber is unsubscribing. This can help give you insights on where you can improve, whether it is related to the content or frequency of email you send.

The success of DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) authentication verification depends on both the sender and the mailbox provider working together to properly configure and implement DKIM signing and verification.

On the sender side, there are two areas of focus to determine the root cause of a DKIM error: the DKIM selector record within DNS and the DKIM signing server.

DKIM verification errors may also be caused by the mailbox provider during the verification process. It’s important that you first validate that you have everything set up correctly before you determine if the error is due to the mailbox provider.

Before you learn different ways to troubleshoot DKIM errors, here’s a tip: A common cause for DKIM verification errors is a missing or misconfigured private or public key. In order for DKIM to work correctly, both of these keys must be present. In some cases, simply regenerating the public and private key pair can resolve the issue and save time troubleshooting.

Steps to troubleshoot

If the tip above doesn’t work, here are some detailed steps to troubleshoot DKIM:

Determine who has access to and controls signing DKIM for your email program and determine who has authority over DNS for your domain. Talk to your IT department, your email administrator or your Email Service Provider (ESP). Many ESPs provide DKIM authentication as a service and might be able to help you troubleshoot.

Use Inbox Monitor to locate an email campaign and check the Issues column on the far right that indicates a DKIM issue for that campaign. Use this campaign to view the email header to see the DKIM error message from the mailbox provider.

Select the subject line for that campaign to view the deliverability results for each mailbox provider.

Select the details button for a mailbox provider such as Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook.com or AOL.

Select the seed details if you have subscriber data from Return Path’s data network, select the Seed details link. If you don’t have subscriber data, go to the next step.

Select the Msg Headers icon next to any seed in the inbox or junk folder. (You will not be able to view an email header for a missing seed.)

Search for the authentication-results header to locate the DKIM verification result. The verification result consists of the dkim label (dkim), an equals sign (=), and a result value.

Here’s an example: Authentication-Results: example.domain.com; spf=pass smtp.mailfrom=domain.com; dkim=pass [email protected]

Write down the DKIM verification result value (dkim=result value).

Repeat steps 4-8 for at least two other mailbox providers. If you used a Gmail header, look at Yahoo!, Outlook.com (Hotmail) or AOL.

If there is a different error result for only one of the mailbox providers, it likely indicates an error by the mailbox provider. Send or check another email message within Inbox Monitor to see if the same error appears for the same mailbox provider. This will help you validate if the error is due to the mailbox provider.

If there are the same error results across multiple mailbox providers, it likely indicates there is an error in the DKIM signing process or within DNS for your domain.

Repeat steps 3-8 for several other campaigns in Inbox Monitor to help determine if the error is consistently coming from a specific mailbox provider. If you don’t see the same error at the mailbox provider, the error may be temporary. Check the next message you send to Inbox Monitor to see if the result was temporary.

If you are seeing errors across all mailbox providers, continue to the next set of steps to troubleshoot the DKIM signing server and DNS configuration.

Troubleshooting the DKIM signing server and DNS configuration

Check the configuration of your DKIM signature server to ensure all required tags are present and are configured correctly. Refer to DKIM signature header detail article for the required and correct tag=value pairs for the DKIM signature.

Ensure there are no incorrect tag=value pairs. The wrong value for a specific tag can cause a verification error.

Ensure there are no empty tag=values. If any of the values are empty, it may cause a verification error.

Ensure there are no unrecognized tags. Tags that are not recognized by a mailbox provider during the verification process may cause a verification error.

Look for invalid characters or extra spaces within the tag=value pair.

Check the configuration of the DKIM DNS record for your domain to ensure all required tags are present and are configured correctly. Refer to DKIM DNS record overview article for the required and correct tag=value pairs for the DKIM signature.

Ensure the p= tag is present and contains the public key

Ensure there are no incorrect tag=value pairs. There are other tag=value pairs that may be used in DNS. The wrong value for a specific tag may cause a verification error.

Ensure there are no empty tag=values. If any of the values are empty, it may cause a verification error.

Ensure there are no unrecognized tags. Tags that are not recognized by a mailbox provider during the verification process may cause a rejection.

Look for invalid characters or extra spaces within the tag=value pair.

If you believe the error is caused by the mailbox provider, contact them through their postmaster site and give them the information about the error so they can investigate. They may have a verification server that is misconfigured or malfunctioning. Most errors caused by a mailbox provider are temporary and are resolved quickly. You should always check multiple campaigns and perform additional tests to determine if there is a possible mailbox provider error before you decide to contact them.

The List-Unsubscribe header is an optional email header you can add to your messages. It allows subscribers to see an unsubscribe button they can click if they would like to automatically stop receiving your email.

List-Unsubscribe is used by Gmail, Outlook.com, and others. It is meant to help reduce complaints by giving subscribers a different method to safely unsubscribe without negatively impacting your sending reputation.

The List-Unsubscribe header is easily confused with two other options that subscribers can use to unsubscribe from your email.

The List-Unsubscribe option is not:

The spam button: When the junk or spam button is clicked, a complaint is triggered, which negatively impacts your sending reputation.

The unsubscribe link within the email creative: This link is usually in the footer of your HTML creative and is controlled by you. However, the List-Unsubscribe functionality is controlled by the mailbox provider, if you have included it in your headers.

In other words, think of the List-Unsubscribe option as a third method for subscribers to get removed from your mailing list. And it’s an option that helps protect your reputation by potentially reducing your complaints.

The List-Unsubscribe email header is defined in RFC 2369.

Segmenting your email list is the process of breaking down your list into small pieces in order to send more targeted and relevant email to subscribers. While it is sometimes appropriate to send one type of email to a national audience, engagement rates are likely to increase when using list segmentation.

Keys to effective segmentation

Start with a simple plan: Choose one or two segments that fit your business.

Test each segment: Testsmall sets of subscribers to determine which segments fit your business and get the best results.

Target additional segments over time: Over time, add more granular segmentation as you learn more about your subscribers and the type of email and content they respond to the best.

Measure performance: Finding segments that produce good results may take time and segment behaviour can evolve along with your business.

How to get started with a basic segmentation strategy and plan

Determine the goal of segmenting your list: Is your goal to bring people to your website, introduce new prospects to your solutions, service existing customers with product information or something else?

Determine what data is available to segment: Your list segments are only as effective as the quality of data you have.

Determine if the data you have is the right data: For example: If you sell clothing, gender is likely a good piece of data to have since it can allow you to send different emails to men and women based on their clothing needs. What attributes about your business and your customers are important?

Develop a plan for getting the right data: Do you need to modify your website or email sign up process to collect better data? Make sure the data collected about subscribers and customers for your business is being captured from all available sources. A good preference center or customer survey can be effective to help you get the right data.

Determine your estimated testing time period and launch date: Allow enough time to test different segments. If you send daily, testing for a couple of weeks may be enough to determine if the segment performs well. If you send monthly, you should test for a few months.

Determine what content and offers will be used for your segments: Once you know what segments you have, determine what content, offer and design choices will target that segment to help you reach your goals.

Segment ideas to help you get started

Engagement level: Determine how your customers engage with you. Engagement may mean when they last read an email, clicked through to your website, logged into their account, attended a webinar or made a purchase. Look at the behavior of those customers that engage within 30/60/90/180/180+ days. You may find that after a certain time period, engagement decreases noticeably. You can then target subscribers who have not engaged when they approach that time period with a special offer.

Purchase history: Are there any patterns to when purchases occur? Do some people purchase at the same time of year or near a holiday? What products do they buy? Do people that buy a product also buy complementary products? A popular technique is to determine complementary products to a recent purchase and promote those products.

Prospects: Prospects have different needs and interests than customers who have already purchased from you.

New customer: A new customer may need educational material and tips on how to make the most of their purchase.

Existing customer: A long-time customer is familiar with you and what you have to offer. How can you add value for these customers?

Demographics: Standard marketing demographics include attributes such as gender, age, income and nationality. Do any of these attributes apply to your business? Do baby boomers buy more or less than millennials?

Location: Are there patterns related to where your products sell based on the customer’s city, state, country or region?Do regional weather patterns and seasons have an impact on purchases?

Executing your segmentation strategy and plan

Prepare your segments: Organize your segments and apply a naming convention so they are easily understood when discussing performance and viewing reports.

Develop the content: Design and create the content you think will get the best response from the target audience.

Start testing: Perform a simple A/B split test on a small subset of subscribers for each segment to find out what content and offers resonate most with your subscribers or customers.

Launch: Once you feel comfortable with the test results, launch your segmentation program.

Track your progress:Keep track of performance to ensure the segmentation program is helping you achieve your business goals.

Tips for creating effective segments

Allow your subscribers and customers to help you segment via the preference center or by sending customer surveys asking for additional information to help serve them better.

If you are not getting results you want, don’t be afraid to try different segments. It may take a few times to create the right segments and content that fits your business.

Potential pitfalls

Doing too much in the beginning: There is nothing wrong with being ambitious. Results are important. It can take time to learn what segments are the best fit for your business, so starting with a basic plan helps you determine how segmentation fits with your business and gives you confidence to try new segments and add sophistication in the future.

Trying to fill in data gaps using a third party: It can be tempting to buy data from a third party, but that data may not be accurate and could lead you down the wrong path and cause you to waste valuable time and resources. If you have data gaps, simple changes to your sign up process or creating a simple preference center can help fill those gaps.

Not testing: If you don’t test different segments and content, you risk spending time and resources on segments that don’t give you good results.

Misunderstanding your customers or target audience: Ensure you determine what customer characteristics are most important and applicable to your business. For example: Do gender differences factor into your business or is age more important? If gender doesn’t matter to your business, then sending targeted content based on gender probably won’t give you good results.

When a mail server unsuccessfully attempts to send a message to another server, it typically results in an automated email response called a bounce. Bounces may be caused by a block by the mailbox provider (MBP), and the reason and additional information such as a postmaster url is normally included within the bounce code.

Here are some examples of actual bounce messages indicating policy blocks. Bounce messagesareclassified as hard bounces, which have a 5xx code, or soft bounces, which have a 4xx code:

Yahoo

smtp;554 Message not allowed - [PH01] Email not accepted for policy reasons. Please visit http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/postmaster-27.html [120 ]

Gmail

421, "4.7.0", Our system has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily blocked.

Gmail SMTP error codes

Microsoft

550 SC-001 (BAY004-MC4F3) Unfortunately, messages from IP XX.XXX.XX.XXX weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors

Senders with good performance are those that stay within the stated thresholds of the Certification program, which includes metrics for:

Complaints

Spam trap hits

Blacklists

Sender Reputation Data (SRD)

Return Path expects certified senders to stay within their thresholds most of the time across most of their IP addresses.

Why maintain good performance?

Repeated or prolonged non-compliance shows that you may have picked up some email acquisition, hygiene, or security practices that are not up to Certification standards.

If you repeatedly fall out of compliance or remain out of compliance for a long time, your sending practices may be subject to review, and your IP addresses may be subject to probation or removal from the Certification program.

How to maintain good performance

To remain compliant, maintain good performance standards by:

Monitoring feedback loops and removing complainers

Monitoring Certification data regularly

Maintaining high engagement rates

Reviewing email best practices

Also, to help with engagement monitoring, bounce processing, list suppression, and traffic segmentation, you must use a bulk mailing program or software for commercial emails.

The purpose of a spam filter is to prevent unsolicited or spam email from reaching the inbox. Spam filters analyze various criteria gathered from the email to determine whether it is spam. Mailbox providers then create a spam score based on the criteria to determine if a campaign passes through the filter. The spam score criteria varies depending on the mailbox provider, so it is possible for a campaign to get through some filtersbut fail to get through other filters.Generally,campaigns must trigger multiple negative criteria check points to befiltered as spam.

Although there are more than a few ways to develop a spam filter, the three methodologies most often employed are:

Algorithms: A set of rules that are followed based on email and sender characteristics.

Heuristics: A problem solving technique used to find an approximate solution when an exact solution cannot be found.

Bayesian: The more advanced form of heuristics that relies on advanced mathematical and statistical techniques to help determine the probability that something is true.

Spam filters use hundreds of data points to determine if an email is spam but they generally focus on four main aspects of email including:

The sender's identity

The IP and domain reputation of the sender

Subscriber behavior

The content of the email

Sender identity

A commonly analyzed aspect by a spam filter is the identity used by the sender. It is used by a mailbox provider to record the IP and domain reputation associated with the sender to help determine trustworthiness. Analyzing sender identity allows spammers to be recognized faster, leading to the spam filter moving messages to the spam folder or blocking the sender completely.

Spam filters use a combination of IP address and domain recognition within the email to create a sender identity and history that is recorded and used to identify and filter future email. Highly recommended but not required; senders have the option of using authentication techniques that help make it easier for a spam filter to identify the sender.Spam filters may or may not use all three forms of identity authentication as part of their filtering criteria.

Thethree forms of authentication are:

Sender Policy Framework(SPF): An SPF record is a type of Domain Name Service (DNS) record that identifies which email servers are permitted to send email on behalf of the domain.The purpose of an SPF record is to prevent spammers from sending messages with forgedFromaddresses at the domain. Recipients can refer to the SPF record to determine whether a message purporting to be from a domain comes from an authorized email server.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): A DKIM record lets an organization take responsibility for a message that is in transit. The organization is a handler of the message, either as its originator or as an intermediary. Its reputation is the basis for evaluating whether to trust the message for further handling, such as delivery. Technically, DKIM provides a method for validating a domain name identity that is associated with a message through cryptographic authentication.

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC): A DMARC record leverages the SPF and DKIM authentication protocols to help communicate to mailbox providers how to treat email with a forged sending domain. A sender can instruct a mailbox provider to ignore, quarantine or reject email should the sender's identity be unverified (using SPF and DKIM) upon receipt.

IP and domain reputation

Reputation-based filters automatically apply the mailbox provider's email flow policies based on the reputation score of the sender. As the filter receives inbound email, a threat assessment of the sender is performed. This assessment returns a reputation score which is linked to email flow policies specified by the mailbox provider administrator. Generally, the lower the reputation score, the more email that is filtered or blocked. Some of the parameters leveraged to generate a reputation score are:

Complaints

Unknown users

Spam traps

Message composition

Volume

Blacklists

Whitelists

Subscriber behavior

Another important aspect of spam filters is looking at the way users interact with messages from a sender. The subscriber behavior is recorded and used by the spam filter to help determine a sender reputation and reputation score. Those reputation scores are then used to help the spam filter determine which email is spam or not spam. Some of the important aspects of subscriber behavior used by spam filters are:

Complaints:Marking an email as spam (This is Spam [TIS]) is used by a spam filter to determine a complaint rate based on the volume from the sender. The higher the rate, the more likely the spam filter calculates a higher spam score.This is seen as a negative interaction by the user towards the sender.

Rescuing email from the spam folder: When a user moves your message out of the spam folder (This is Not Spam [TINS]), it is also used to determine a rate based on the volume from the sender. The higher the rate, the more likely the spam filter calculates a lower spam score. This is seen as a positive interaction by the user towards the sender.

Reads:Users are less likely to read email they consider to be spam. Reads are typically time-based. When a user opens a message and keeps it open for a period of time, it implies they are reading the contents. When a user reads your message, it is used to determine a rate based on the volume from the sender. The higher the rate, the more likely the spam filter calculates a lower spam score. This is seen as a positive interaction by the user towards the sender.

Deleting without opening: Users tend to delete messages without opening when they are not interested in the content. If a large number of users consistently delete messages without opening them or unsubscribing, it is likely to raise the spam score.This is seen as a negative interaction by the user towards the sender.

Content

Content analysis technology scans email, everything from the header, footer, code, HTML markup, images, text color, timestamp, URLs, subject line, text-to-image ratio, language, attachments, and more. For some content filters, there is not one part of the message that the content filter ignores. Other content filters may look at only the structure of an email, while still others simply parse URLs out of the message and then reference them against a blacklist (like the Spam Uniform Resources identifier Real-time Block List [SURBL]).

One well-known method of analyzing content is called fingerprinting. Technology providers like Cloudmark are known for creating fingerprints of email content. Fingerprinting is a technology that helps filters make decisions about email.

IP warming, or IP warm-up, is the way you establish a reputation for a new IP, or an IP that has not been used for some time. The warm-up process involves sending email from the new IP starting with small volumes, and gradually increasing the volume of email each day or week according to a set schedule. The goal is to develop your identity and gain the mailbox providers’ trust, and increase your chances of getting your email delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes.

Mailbox providers are suspicious of email coming from an IP that has no reputation or that has an unfamiliar sending pattern. They have to protect their customers from spam, so they will block or bulk large volumes of email from new IPs, because it is most often coming from spammers. That’s why you need to use best practices to warm up your IPs before your send your normal volumes from your new IP, to show the mailbox providers you are serious about having a good reputation.

Read the How to warm up an IP address article for all of the details you need to know.

Changing sending credentials can be a challenge, but there are situations that call for it and best practices for doing it right.

You may need to change sending credentials if:

You are changing your brand

You want to improve your subscribers' experience

Best practice recommendations

When making changes to an existing email stream, consider the following recommendations to improve your subscribers' experience and manage your sender reputation:

Change your Friendly-From name andsending addressor domain to a meaningful name, ensuring it is recognizable and resonates with your subscribers. Many spam complaints occur when a subscriber does not recognize the sender.

Choose a Friendly-From name that is short enough so it will not be truncated in the inbox.

Inform your subscribers in advance of your sending credentials change, especially if it involves a change in the brand name. Encourage subscribers to add the new address to their personal address book or contact list. Test to determine the ideal timing; one to two months should suffice.

Remind your subscribers often about the upcoming change and your reason for the change. This may reduce the rise in unsubscribe requests and spam complaints you receive during the transition. Keeping subscribers informed may also reduce the risk of open and click rates decreasing at the same time.

Warm up your new domain. Similar to sending from a new IP address, a new domain does not have a sending reputation and switching over to a new domain without warming it up can cause deliverability problems. Take a similar approach to warming up a new IP address.

Ensure your authentication records are updated.

If you are only changing the Friendly-From name and not changing your domain, then you don't need to update your authentication records.

Update your DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signatures.

Update your Yahoo! and United Online complaint feedback loops.

Update yourSender Policy Framework (SPF) record for a new mail-from (Return-path) domain.

Update your Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) record.

Monitor performance for the new domain so you can identify and troubleshoot problems as they occur.

A domain blacklist (DBL) is a database of spam domains that includes:

Spam URLs

Sender domains known to be spammers

Domain blacklists contain a domain name instead of an IP address.

An IP-based blacklist is a list of IP addresses that have been reported and listed as known sources of spam.

A blacklist is a list of IP addresses or domains that have been reported as known sources of spam.

There are two types:

Public blacklists are made available to the public. Some are offeredas a free service, while others require a fee. There are hundreds of well known public blacklists, and there may be thousands in existence. The number of blacklists can change at any time, because many blacklisting systems allow mailbox providers and system administrators to start their own list based upon another list.

Private blacklists tend to be based on strict spam filtering and cannot be queried externally. You will not know you are on a private blacklist until you receive bounce messages from the spam filters. Thebounces are usually managed by the mailbox provider.

A botnet is a network of computer devices infected and controlled by an unauthorized third party using malicious software. Botnets are used to send spam from infected computer devices often without the knowledge of the device owner.