A wise man once said, “The only constant is change.” This couldn’t be more true for the world of email. Back in the good old days, email deliverability was often determined by your subject line or spammy words used in your content. Change one or two words and “Poof!” you’re in the inbox.  Now things aren’t so simple. ISP’s no longer rely on any one single factor in determining if your email is spam or a legitimate email. 

If you put some planning into your sending patterns and communicate consistently, you will find your deliverability to be greatly improved. For more tips on building relationships with ISP’s, click here.

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Each day email marketing becomes increasingly sophisticated. From MTA throttling techniques to data marts, the email marketing space has changed tremendously over the past few years. There are still basic building blocks to email marketing that the customer controls and needs to ensure are setup. Role accounts are one of those basic items that every person who engages in email marketing needs to setup and actively monitor. A role account is nothing more than an abuse@ and postmaster@ email account for the domain you use in your “From” email addresses.

Some users will not use your unsubscribe links and just forward their unsubscribe request to one or both of the role accounts. It’s important that you setup these accounts and actively check them. Another best practice with your role accounts is to register them with Abuse.net. Many ISP’s and blacklisting organizations want to see legitimate mailers with listings in this database. It helps to show you are not trying to hide where complaints should be sent.

Adding role accounts is very easy. Make sure your domain has them and that someone is actively monitoring these accounts.

We would like to officially announce that development of the next version of Publicaster is underway. Since its development, we have received a lot of great feedback on Publicaster 6.0 from our users. We have incorporated that feedback into what we think will be the pinnacle of online marketing tools.

Publicaster 7.0 will not just be about email. This new version will also offer various other distribution channels to our clients, such as RSS, blog, TXT and podcasts. In addition to this, we are redesigning our existing infrastructure to allow for tremendous scalability and personalization. We are also tightly integrating with delivery assurance tools to help maximize our clients’ inbox placement.

There is much more to come that we know will be of remarkable value to our clients. Keep an eye out as we are planning a beta launch of Publicaster 7.0 at the beginning of 2008. If you would like to be considered to become a beta tester, please email bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com.

In September, we featured a post about three ways to improve email deliverability. The feedback from our users regarding this article has been great and we have been able to help many people with their setup over the past month. However, in many cases, interested clients have not been able to modify their DNS, because either they could not get past the barriers presented by their networking staff or because they didn’t have access to their DNS.

I’ve thought about this problem and tested a solution with a couple of clients with very positive results. This solution was to register the client a new domain and used the very inexpensive mail and DNS services provided by today’s top registrars. In this particular example, I will use godaddy.com, but you are free to use any domain registering company you wish. Some of the other good ones are register.com and dotster.com.

In this specific situation, our client, ABC Company, needed to register a domain name for use in their Friendly From Email Address for email marketing. ABC Company decided to register the name abcCompany-news.com. Basically they just appended “-news” to the end of the existing domain. This keeps the name recognition to your subscribers and is something more friendly than the typical ESP type of domain you see in many places. After registering this name and setting up the DNS and email, they switched their Friendly From Email Address on their next campaign to use donotreply@abcCompany-news.com. They were very happy with the overall improvement in deliverability and are happy to have easy access to the account to collect bounces and challenges.

One word of warning: when you agree to use one of the large registrars, you must be able to backup the source of your subscribers. If you use that domain to send questionable emails and someone complains, you will be shut down and possibly fined. Over several hundreds of thousands of emails that went out in this case, one person complained to the registrar. The registrar contacted the client and asked for clarification. Luckily, our client kept good records and was able to respond with the detail of exactly how and when the subscriber opted into their list.

Now I’m going to walk you through step by step of registering a new domain name and setting up email and DNS. In our example, we are going to register the domain name bsffactorydirect.com.

Step 1: Go to godaddy.com, search for your domain name and register it. During the checkout process, be sure to include Email Hosting during your check process. As you see below, for a whopping investment of $22.18, I now have a new domain name and email hosting ready to go.

Step 2: Once your account is setup, log into your account with the information that godaddy.com provides. You will see a link for “Host and Email” where you can configure your email. This will launch godaddy’s email setup. Click on the “Add” email button and fill out the simple form they give you. I created an account called “donotreply”. I left everything default except for creating an auto-responder, as this is an unmonitored email account. You can use your favorite email client to send and receive email form this account. Refer to the godaddy documentation on the how-to.

Step 3: Setup your DNS with a SPF record and an A record. First step is to make your new domain name point to your corporate website. The first record in your DNS is called an A (Host). This is what controls where your name points. Click the Edit button and type in the IP address of your corporate site (this is the hardest part, I promise).

You are almost there! At this point, you’ll need to contact Blue Sky Factory support if you haven’t already to have us create a SPF record and Domain Key for you. Once you get that information from us, set up your SPF record first. Godaddy offers a “SPF Wizard” but that is actually more complicated than it needs to be. Instead, simply click on “Add New TXT Record” and in the TXT Name field enter a “@” character. Then in the TXT Value field, enter the SPF record we supplied you with, which will look something like: v=spf1 a mx ip4:69.63.151.0/24 ~all. Step 4: With the information from Blue Sky Factory, you are also now ready to set up your Domain Key. This step looks a little scary, but just follow the step-by-step instructions here and you will be fine. In the email you receive from Blue Sky Factory, you will be given the entries you need to add as TXT entries just as you did in the step above. Below are some examples of what these TXT entries will look like:

Click on “Add New TXT Record” again. For the TXT Name, enter “_domainkey” and for the value type in “o=~”.

Then, click to add another TXT record. For the value field, take the entry from your email (example from above is “factorydirect._domainkey.bsffactorydirect.com”) and copy all the text up to the “.” after “_domainkey” (factorydirect._domainkey) and use that for your TXT Name. Your TXT Value is the big long funny looking string without the “\”. Godaddy’s DNS doesn’t like the “\” so just leave it out – other ISP’s may allow its use.

And that’s it! I can now use donotreply@bsffactorydirect.com as the Friendly From in my Publicaster campaigns, and I’ve set up three new TXT entries - one for the SPF record and two for Domain Keys. Trust me, after you do this one time it will be much quicker to do the next time.

Does this sound a little daunting to you or are you having trouble finding your IP address? Feel free to contact bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com with any questions you have about this and we will be happy to walk you through this process.

Deliverability has been a hot topic lately. There are a few things that can be done to improve your overall deliverability, specifically setting up SPF, SenderID and Domain Keys. The water has been muddied regarding these topics and an in-depth discussion is well beyond what will be discussed below. However, I would like to hit on some of the key points of why they are totally worth your time to setup. With just a few simple DNS entries, we have seen deliverability to certain ISPs improve from 10 – 20%.

As you all know, it is a constant struggle for legitimate email marketers to separate themselves from the droves of evil spammers. ISPs try their best to differentiate SPAM from email that their users want to receive (remember, ISPs view SPAM as email their users don’t want). However, given the volume of email ISPs receive and lengths spammers go through to disguise their content, it is very difficult for the ISPs to get it perfect.

I would like to tell you that all ISPs got together in a giant love fest and agreed on a way to prove a certain piece of email was actually sent by you. That would make all our lives much much easier. However, it’s not the case.

Instead, three basic methods (SPF, SenderID and Domain Keys) were adopted to help you communicate to the ISPs that the email is in fact from you. The only thing they all have in common is that they require a simple TXT entry into a DNS server. Think of a DNS as the phonebook of the internet. If you own a domain name (ex. mydomainname.com), all the information the geeks need to do stuff is contained in the DNS. If you own a domain name, then you have a DNS server.

Let’s take a quick look at how each of the different techniques tries to accomplish their task.

First, let’s go over SPF/SenderID. For the the sake of this conversation SPF and SenderID are the same, as SenderID is merely Microsoft’s verison of SPF.

When you send an email from Publicaster, you specify in your campaign the Friendly From Address, which is the email address recipients will see the email came from. Publicaster then takes this information, puts it into the raw email message and sends it off to the ISP. Once your email comes into the mail server for an ISP, four things occur:

1. The ISP looks at the email which is sent from our email server and determines that it came from Publicaster. This information is stored in the inner workings of how email is transferred from server to server.

2. The ISP determines that the email is supposed to be from the Friendly From Address.

3. Next, the ISP looks to your DNS server and basically asks the question, “Is Publicaster allowed to send email on your behalf?”

4. Then your DNS server responds back with a Yes, No or Maybe. What you want is to make sure of is that the answer is Yes!

The third method, Domain Keys, tries to do the same thing as SPF, but it requires that your email have an electronic signature. No need to worry, Publicaster handles all that for you. With Domain Keys, rather than just looking at the Friendly From Address on which to base its decision, the ISP takes the signature contained in the email and pulls from your DNS another special entry. Some mathematical hocus pocus is performed and the ISP can tell if this message is from a legitimate source.

Now I have painted some really broad strokes here, but the common theme is that two simple entries need to be made into the DNS server for the domain you are using to send mail. Once made, the deliverability should improve dramatically.

Blue Sky Factory can help you through this process as one of the services we perform for you. Email bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com or contact your account manager and we will get you all setup and walk you through any DNS modifications.

Over the next few months, I will talk some more about the technical why and how of Domain Keys and SPF. I will also try to start some discussions on IP reputation and why it’s as important as content.

Blue Sky Factory is pleased to announce the availability of a new API that clients can leverage to provide a seamless experience for their users. The new API is called ‘Forward to a Friend’. As you can imagine, this expands upon Publicaster’s already popular Forward to Friend feature. Now you can create and host your own customized Forward to a Friend landing page and simply pass the data along to Publicaster for inclusion in a Publicaster defined email that gets sent to the Forward to a Friend targets.

What makes the API so special is that you have total control of the form you want the users to fill out and you have the ability to work with the data. The general flow of things using our API is this: (1)You create and host your forward to a friend form on your own site (users never leave the comfort of your environment). (2)When the form is submitted, you call our API to activate our Forward To Friend code. (3)Then you can take that data (since you have never left control of your site) and put it into an internal sales leads database or shoot it into your SalesForce database – the choice is yours.

Ok, now let’s talk about how to get this set up and working from within Publicaster. The Forward to Friend API will use an existing email content you have already defined in Publicaster. You will notice when you are in the email editor a new field called ‘Campaign ID.’ Make a note of this ID – you will need it for the API.

Lets take a look at the API argument signature. It’s really pretty straight forward.

SendtoFriend(ByVal CampaignID As String, _
ByVal AccountID As String, _
ByVal FromName As String, _
ByVal FromAddress As String, _
ByVal SubjectLine As String, _
ByVal MailContent As String, _
ByVal StringOemails As String) As emailStats

Campaign ID – This is the ID (remember I told you to keep track of it) of the email template you want to send to the potential subscribers.

AccountID – This is your encrypted account id. Existing API users are very familiar with this little nugget. If you are not, you can get your encrypted API from Account Manager -> Account Preferences (at the bottom).

FromName – This is a string that you pass that will display in the email that is being sent ad the Friendly From Name.

FromAddress – This is a string that will display in the email as the Reply-To address.

SubjectLine – Another, you guessed it, string that will display as the subject line in the email.

MainContent – A string where you can specify a custom message you want to append to the top body portion of the email you are sending. A very popular Forward to a Friend feature is a little blurb of text the person who using the form may want to pass on to their users. For example: “Hey All – thought you might find this interesting!” In addition to the exiting Publicaster content, we will put this text right after the closing body tag.

Hint: A heavy graphical based email may not work best for Forward To Friend. Make sure before you start using Forward To Friend that you test to make sure the format is like you want.

StringOEmails – Well we know it’s definitely a string. Actually, to be a little nerdy, it’s a pipe “” delimited string. So for the list of emails you want to send this message to, just create a pipe delimited string- well parse and validate and only send to valid emails. Eg ‘foobar@blah.com,jimmybuffett@margaritivalle.com,chomp@chew.com’

We also provide a return object so you can tell if your send was successful. The name of the object is ‘emailStats’ and it will return:

SendSuccess – A Boolean telling you if the emails were sent.
numSent – Tells you how many emails were actually sent.
errorDescription – In the event of a problem, we will tell you exactly what happened.

How to exactly use a web service really depends on what language you are using. But for some general 101 type of info check out.

http://www.15seconds.com/Issue/010530.htm
http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2004/03/24/phpws.html
http://www.asp101.com/articles/colin/webservices/default.asp

Let’s talk about a few things that our Forward to a Friend feature will NOT do. First, we do not store the users email in our database. We require any subscriber that is entered into our database be opted in. If a user fills out a Forward To Friend form and click submit, the people getting the email never opted in to anything so they cannot be stored in Publicaster. Second, we don’t track any stats on who the mail was sent to and if they acted on the mail. Again, it’s because they are not Publicaster Opt-in user so we don’t store them in our database. Also, any Publicaster customizations you have in your Forward to a Friend Email will be stripped out and not sent to the user.

If you would like full documentation or example on this new API – please email bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com.

A couple of other upcoming IT stuff here at the Factory. We are in the final testing phases of our new List Import tool that will allow you to import Excel files! Also, we are launching an API next month that will let you send an Publicaster email to an already defined list without ever logging into Publicaster. Stayed tuned for news and information!

Well it took all night and most of the next day, but Blue Sky Factory is now on a totally new and beefed up hardware platform. The IT staff here at BSF took some time and looked at our trends of growth and server usage. After a good hard look we came to the conclusion that to support our recent rapid growth we need to reinvest in our hardware backend and make a few tweaks to our application. So onto the phone with Dell we began. After several weeks of talking with their server guys (man they are smart) and our NOC (Edge Web Hosting – even smarter) and many different tweaks to configurations we finally settled on a new hardware configuration. Actually, we replaced ALL of our existing servers with significant improvements. In servers were we had 2 CPU’s we now have 8. In servers where we had 4 GB of RAM we now have 16! We have implemented NAS storage with super fast hard drives. This gives us the unparalleled ability to scale and meet the growing demands on our infrastructure.

All users should notice an immediate and dramatic speed boost while working in Publicaster 6. In addition to new hardware we also added load balancing to our web servers, so user traffic gets redirected to the most underutilized server. This ensures the fastest possible response out of our farm and in the event that one of our servers goes down – traffic will redirect automatically and the end user will never be affected. We took similar strides with our database server. We now have mirrored database servers that in the event of a server crash another server is waiting patiently to take over the responsibilities of fulfilling user requests.

Coming soon to Publicaster is a totally new list import utility. We took some time and reorganized the work flow and made some dramatic speed improvements. We will be the first provider that we know of that will let users upload their Excel files directly into Publicaster! Also, those users who want to import text files we haven’t forgotten about you, in fact our recent improvements will support numerous delimiters and text qualifiers. We are currently in Beta so if all goes well you should see the new List Import tool in about 2 weeks.

Stay tuned more exciting things are coming down the pipe!