Without realizing it, you may look like a spammer to your Email Service Provider!
If you’re like many of our clients, you’ve spent years carefully collecting email addresses for your list. The problem is, you’ve never been able to find the time to send that first email. Finally you get around to choosing an Email Service Provider (ESP) like ConstantContact, MailChimp, or MadMimi, to name a few. Then you start the process:
- Design your email.
- Upload your list.
- Send your email.
- Receive an email from you ESP with this Subject Line: “Important Notice: Please call us”
In the body of the email is a message like this:
Getting your email delivered into your recipient’s inbox is very important to all of us. It’s one of the reasons we maintain one of the highest delivery ratings in the industry. In order to assist us we have various automated controls to monitor all aspects of your account and to help identify area’s that may cause email delivery problems.
At this time your account has been identified to include a condition that may cause delivery problems. A review of your account must be completed for you to continue to send mail. We will review delivery issues/complaint rates, list collection practices, email content and frequency as well as any other matters that may violate our terms of service. Although your account has been temporarily disabled, your account is still active and will be billed accordingly.
Please contact us for a review of your account as soon as possible.
So What Did You Do Wrong?
There are a few things that can trigger an alert like this for an ESP. Here’s some background:
Every email is sent from an IP address (a unique string of numbers separated by periods that identifies each computer or mail server attached to the Internet). ESPs like Constant Contact, MailChimp, and MadMimi work hard to ensure all the IP addresses they own (sometimes referred to as their range of IP addresses since they are in sequential order) are whitelisted. This means they work within the guidelines set forth by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail and Yahoo to avoid looking like a spammer. This practically guarantees all emails sent from their IP addresses make it into the inbox instead of spam.
ISPs like Gmail and Yahoo want to protect their email users from spam, so they watch for suspicious activities. These include the following:
You Sent to Spam Email Addresses.
One of the tactics spammers use to reach inboxes is finding a website address and then adding a “role” prefix to form an email address. Role addresses are basically guaranteed email addresses baked into every email setup. For example, if they want to send spam email to company.com, they would send to webmaster@company.com. This role address is almost always mapped to an inbox at the company.
Some of your customers may actually use these email addresses to sign up for your list. They include:
| accounting@ | media@ |
| admin@ | news@ |
| admissions@ | noc@ |
| all@ | no-reply@ |
| billing@ | office@ |
| booking@ | ops@ |
| careers@ | postmaster@ |
| contact@ | privacy@ |
| contact-us@ | remove@ |
| customerservice@ | request@ |
| custserv@ | resumes@ |
| editor@ | root@ |
| everyone@ | sales@ |
| feedback@ | security@ |
| finance@ | spam@ |
| ftp@ | subscribe@ |
| helpdesk@ | support@ |
| hostmaster@ | test@ |
| info@ | usenet@ |
| information@ | users@ |
| investorrelations@ | uucp@ |
| jobs@ | webmaster@ |
| mail@ | www@ |
This list also includes addresses that have “admin” embedded in the address, such as listadmin@, serviceadmin@, etc.
ESPs generally will not send mail to an email address that contains the word spam anywhere in its name.
People Didn’t Want Your Email.
Since you have never sent to your email list, or you haven’t sent to them in a long time, people may have forgotten they even signed up for your list. Their first instinct will be to hit the “Spam” button in their email interface.
When a huge percentage of email recipients are marking messages coming from an IP address as spam, ISPs take that as a sign the IP address is owned by a spammer, and they will start routing all emails from that IP address directly to spam instead of the inbox. This really upsets your ESP.
It Looks Like You Made People Up.
Since you have never sent to your email list, or you haven’t sent to them in a long time, there will likely be quite a few email addresses that are no longer valid. These emails will “bounce”.
From Campaign Monitor:
A ‘bounce’ means that your email was sent to a specific address, but the mail server that received the email for that person has sent it back, saying it could not be delivered. There are quite a few different reasons that might happen, and we can divide them into two main categories.
A soft bounce is an email message that gets as far as the recipient’s mail server (it recognizes the address) but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient’s mailbox is full, the server is down or swamped with messages, or the message is too large.
Soft bounces can also include things like auto-replies to your email.…
A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable. Causes include invalid addresses (domain name doesn’t exist, typos, changed address, etc.) or the email recipient’s mail server has blocked your server. Servers can sometimes interpret bounces differently, meaning a soft bounce on one server may be classified as a hard bounce on another.
Once an email has soft bounced 3 times without any trackable activity, most ESPs consider this a hard bounce. Most ESPs automatically unsubscribe hard bounces, so they don’t receive future campaigns.
A high percentage of bounces makes it look like you’re making up email addresses, something spammers do. ISPs take high bounce rates as a sign the IP address is owned by a spammer, and they will start routing all emails from that IP address directly to spam instead of the inbox. Again, this really upsets your ESP.
Preventative Measures
When sending to your email list for the first time, after after a long break, or switching a new ESP:
- Remove all “Role” addresses before uploading your email list. In the future, do not allow people to sign up for your email list with these types of addresses.
- Put your Unsubscribe link at the top of the email. This makes it easier for people to unsubscribe instead of marking you as spam, which will make your ESP very happy.
- Break your list into small batches. Upload a small list of people each day and send a copy of the newsletter to each list. This should ensure you don’t get a bunch of unsubscribes and bounces at once. Be sure to remove duplicates before you break your list into chunks to avoid sending twice to the same person.
After your initial send, the number of bounces and unsubscribes should decrease significantly. You can likely send to your full subscriber base without running the risk of getting your account suspended.
Have you ever had your account suspended? Tell us your story!
