I have been learning a lot about a very interesting subject: deliverability. Ever since I started working on this project which includes a huge mailing list, I feel like my knowledge of ‘how mail gets to your inbox’ has increased considerably. It sounds like a simple matter, but there is a lot to it. Mostly because of people who love to sell medicine or other products you don’t really want (AKA spammers)
This project integrates with Lyris List Manager, a pretty awesome tool for managing your mailing lists. I say ‘pretty awesome’ instead of ‘totally awesome’ because I’m still waiting for them to fix a couple of major bugs that are stopping our project. When they do (this week?) I’ll change my opinion.
However, this tool gives you great visibility over the results of your mailings. You can see if they received the message, if the SMTP server blocked your message, if the address doesn’t really exist, if the ISP of your subscriber doesn’t really exist, if they clicked the SPAM button, if they unsubscribed and when they did and probably a whole lot of other things that I haven’t seen yet.
Here are a few reasons why your message would not get to someone’s inbox:
1. You have the address wrong (the account doesn’t really exist at the ISP – eg. etagwerker@domain.com, etagwerker isn’t a user of domain.com anymore)
2. The ISP doesn’t really exist (I’ve seen every way someone can misspell Yahoo – eg. Yaoho, Yaoo, Yhaoo, Yaho, ayhoo – amazing but real)
3. The ISP has some strong content blocker (some ISPs do not like when you add ‘Free!’ to your subject) and the subscriber hasn’t added you to his/her contacts list yet
4. The ISP decided to defer your message for later, because you are probably sending too many emails in a period of time (Yahoo is a specialist on this matter)
5. The ISP woke up cranky and decided that it didn’t like an image or some content in the body of your message (seriously, different days have different results and the only thing that changes in my mailing is the content)
Those are a few reasons why mail won’t get to someone’s inbox. There are a lot more, but maybe this article serves as an introduction to the huge deliverability area of knowledge.
deliverability 101
I have been learning a lot about a very interesting subject: deliverability. Ever since I started working on this project which includes a huge mailing list, I feel like my knowledge of ‘how mail gets to your inbox’ has increased considerably. It sounds like a simple matter, but there is a lot to it. Mostly because of people who love to sell medicine or other products you don’t really want (AKA spammers)
This project integrates with Lyris List Manager, a pretty awesome tool for managing your mailing lists. I say ‘pretty awesome’ instead of ‘totally awesome’ because I’m still waiting for them to fix a couple of major bugs that are stopping our project. When they do (this week?) I’ll change my opinion.
However, this tool gives you great visibility over the results of your mailings. You can see if they received the message, if the SMTP server blocked your message, if the address doesn’t really exist, if the ISP of your subscriber doesn’t really exist, if they clicked the SPAM button, if they unsubscribed and when they did and probably a whole lot of other things that I haven’t seen yet.
Here are a few reasons why your message would not get to someone’s inbox:
1. You have the address wrong (the account doesn’t really exist at the ISP – eg. etagwerker@domain.com, etagwerker isn’t a user of domain.com anymore)
2. The ISP doesn’t really exist (I’ve seen every way someone can misspell Yahoo – eg. Yaoho, Yaoo, Yhaoo, Yaho, ayhoo – amazing but real)
3. The ISP has some strong content blocker (some ISPs do not like when you add ‘Free!’ to your subject) and the subscriber hasn’t added you to his/her contacts list yet
4. The ISP decided to defer your message for later, because you are probably sending too many emails in a period of time (Yahoo is a specialist on this matter)
5. The ISP woke up cranky and decided that it didn’t like an image or some content in the body of your message (seriously, different days have different results and the only thing that changes in my mailing is the content)
Those are a few reasons why mail won’t get to someone’s inbox. There are a lot more, but maybe this article serves as an introduction to the huge deliverability area of knowledge.