Email Delivery Best Practices

Notes from the Road: 2007 Authentication and Online Trust Summit

In April, the BlueHornet DMS team represented clients at the Authentication & Online Trust Alliance (AOTA) Summit in Boston. We attended a variety of meetings, panels, and sessions hosted by ISPs and postmasters. The theme of the summit centered on email authentication, anti-phishing, and anti-spam tactics/technologies.

Pre-Summit Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail Briefing
Deliverability Bootcamp Session – AOL/Comcast
Our Recommendations

Pre-Summit Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail Briefing

Before the summit kicked off, we attended a half-day session hosted by Microsoft. They walked us through the new Windows Live Mail offerings and discussed Microsoft's anti-spam strategy and technologies. This was an incredibly informative afternoon.

Some Key Insights:

• There are 280 million Hotmail inboxes and four billion pieces of spam are sent to those addresses per day.
• Sender ID is vital. Adoption has grown to 43% of legitimate mail and is supported by eight million domains.
• Microsoft looks at many factors to determine your reputation, including your IP, the URLs used in your mail, your domain, user complaints, spam traps, unknown user rates, sending infrastructure, and volume patterns.
• If you are sending from a new IP address, you have not established a reputation for that IP yet, so your mail will be throttled by Microsoft's receiving servers until your reputation is determined. Whether your reputation proves to be good or bad, Microsoft is taking a "guilty until proven innocent" approach to protect their customers.
• Keep your mailing lists clean. Mailing lists are analyzed and must have little to no "unknown users." These are dead or discontinued email addresses that are no longer valid.

Your Delivery To-Do List
It is now more critical than ever to persuade subscribers to add your "from" address to their address book. It not only increases your inbox delivery by allowing the message to bypass filters, but it also ensures that when the mail arrives, images and URLs will be enabled by default. Always add verbiage to the top of every email you send asking subscribers to add your "from" address to their address book.

In addition, make sure you are following these best practices:

• Keep a consistent "from" address.
• Place your company name in your subject lines.
• Purge old, bad, inactive email addresses from your lists.
• Before sending your email, make sure that your URLs point to valid domains.
• Give subscribers choices and clear vision into what they will be receiving when they sign up.
• Implement Sender ID!

Deliverability Bootcamp Session – AOL/Comcast

The postmasters from AOL and Comcast provided information regarding their anti-spam stance as well as the processes and procedures that their systems use to determine reputation:

AOL
Once you hit "send" on an email to an AOL subscriber, that piece of mail has a long journey ahead of it. There are a number of filters it must pass through before it gets to the inbox. Here is an overview of AOL's anti-spam filters:

• Internal Blacklist Filter: Made up of domains and IPs that are currently blacklisted internally at AOL. 
• Reputation Filter: Based on metrics from data such as spam traps and abuse complaints from AOL users.
• Whitelist Filter: Checks to see if your "from" address is in the subscriber's address book and if your IP is on the AOL standard whitelist.
• Volume Filter: If your IP is not on AOL's standard whitelist, your mail goes through this filter.
• Content Filter: Parses the content of your mail to look for spam-like words and phrases.
• Recipient Filter: Based on AOL subscriber personal settings within their AOL account.

AOL Recommended Best Practices

• Authenticate your mail. AOL plans to leverage email authentication in its reputation checks beginning in the latter half of this year.
• Relevance is key! Send subscribers content relevant to profile attributes and preferences.
• Purge unknown users and inactive email addresses.

Comcast
Because Comcast has seen a lot of growth in recent years, they are increasing their focus on internal anti-spam technologies. We are excited that they plan to launch a feedback loop by the end of the year, and they've already made some improvements to their postmaster site. Here is an overview of Comcast's anti-spam filters:

• 3rd party blacklists and filters are leveraged including Symantec Brightmail.
• Volume Filters:  A sender's volume is monitored for consistency and patterns.
• Content Filters: Content is analyzed for spam-like words and phrases.
• Reputation Filters: Spam complaints and unknown user rates are monitored closely.

Comcast Recommended Best Practices

• Closely monitor and purge unknown users and inactive email addresses.
• Authenticate your mail. Comcast will be adopting this as another determining factor for reputation by the end of this year.

Our Recommendations
You'll note some recurring themes in the above information, specifically email authentication, unknown user rates, and getting into the address book. Here's more about what we can do together to stay ahead of these three pressing issues:

Email Authentication
Sender ID is becoming an integral part of Microsoft's and other major ISPs' determination of your reputation as a sender. BlueHornet can help you determine whether you are compliant and we can provide you detailed instructions on how to get set up. This will not only help improve inbox delivery, it will also mitigate the risk of your mail being flagged by anti-phishing filters.  If you have questions regarding Sender ID, whether or not you are currently compliant, or you need instructions on setting it up, please send an email to SenderID@bluehornet.com and a member of our Sender ID team will contact you to assist.

Unknown User Rates
To keep unknown user rates as low as possible, monitor your subscriber activity.  In the BlueHornet system, you can run queries via the Search page to search for subscribers who have not clicked or opened an email in X amount of days/months. Once you've determined which subscribers have been inactive, you can remove them from your lists or reach out to them to reconfirm their interest in your email program.

Additionally, as part of our SureSend™ offerings, we can conduct a trend analysis on the bounce error codes that are being passed back to us from the domains you are sending to.  This will help ensure you stay ahead of this pressing issue. To request a bounce trend analysis, send an email to SureSend@BlueHornet.com now.