According to renowned author and marketer Seth Godin, recipients want to receive marketing communication that is personal, relevant, and anticipated. In this era of customer relationship marketing, it’s even more important for companies to go beyond CAN-SPAM compliance and create trust-based email marketing programs.

Join Blue Sky Factory for a special webinar, “Permission-Based Email Marketing: Privacy, Preferences & Best Practices”, as Dr. Steve Lucas, Chief Compliance Officer at EDGE Web Hosting and one of the CAN-SPAM Act authors, discusses permission-based email marketing. Dr. Lucas will provide invaluable information to email marketers based on six core elements of a trust-based approach - permission, privacy, reputation, preferences, expectations, and compliance.

Attendees will learn:

- Key requirements of CAN-SPAM
- Best practices for acquiring permission from subscribers
- How to ensure and manage email compliance
- How to maintain a trust-focused reputation
- Other key knowledge and tips for email marketers, including privacy policies and managing subscribers’ expectations

This webinar is taking place Tuesday, June 30 from 3:00 to 3:45 PM.

Click here to register. Hope to see you there!

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about the growing importance of role accounts. To recap, role accounts are abuse@ and postmaster@ email accounts that people would typically use to speak with someone who is deemed to be authoritative for a domain. To find out why it is extremely important to have role accounts set up, how people use them, and how to make the most of them once they are set up, click here.

Yesterday I talked about whitelisting and blacklisting – what they are and how to use them. Greylisting is where many of the questions from Blue Sky Factory clients are coming from, and I want to discuss greylists in more detail.

Greylists: A greylist isn’t really a list per se, but rather a method of not accepting an email the first time from a sender. Let me explain how email servers communicate. My email server talks to your email server when it wants to send you a message. In a perfect situation, my server tells your server, “I have a message for Betty.” Your email server replies, “I know Betty, we’ll take the message.” I send the message, and your server thanks me nicely. The transmission is now complete. Even in perfect situations, if your mail server is a little too busy taking in other mail, it may tell me to try again later. My mail server will then try again in about 15 minutes, and will try over and over again - for up to 23 hours - before I finally give up and stop trying to send.

When you initially send to your email server, greylisting means the server will basically say, “I don’t want your email now; try me again in 10 minutes.” This is done (on purpose) around the premise that most spammers using a zombie or a BOT will never try to resend that email, but a true mail server will resend the email (as mentioned above). After 15 minutes when I resend the email, the server that does greylisting will then add my IP addresses or return path to an internal list that will, in the future, allow email transfers for first time acceptance (usually most greylists expire the first acceptance after some small window of time).

From an email marketing perspective, there is nothing to worry about if a subscriber’s mail server greylists. Email will most likely be a little delayed in getting to them, but they will eventually receive the email (all other things being equal). Where my biggest problem with greylisting comes in is for transactional types of emails. Typically they are generated from a program that just does a straight one-time send. This is the one major drawback of greylisting that has caused organizations much pain. Another issue with greylisting is for email senders with older servers because their servers may not be capable of resending an email. Luckily not many places use greylisting – though it does rear its head from time to time.

If you have additional questions on greylisting, feel free to contact us at bsfinfo@blueskyfactory.com. If you’re already a Blue Sky Factory client, please contact your account manager.

We have recently received a lot of questions from customers on greylisting and how it affects their email campaigns. I thought I would take this opportunity to write on this topic and try my best to define the different lists and what purpose each one serves.

First, there is no formal definition of whitelisting, blacklisting, or greylisting. Everyone who receives email has their own interpretation of what they are or how to implement their usage. Therein lies our dilemma. We can give clients a general guideline, but there are no rules set in stone for what these lists are or how they work across email receivers. Over a two part series, I will do my best to break down and highlight the things that matter the most for email marketers. Today we will start with whitelisting and blacklisting, and will continue on tomorrow to discuss greylisting.

Whitelists: At the end of the day, whitelists are a good thing for email marketers. They offer a way to help ensure that your email will be accepted by the receiving mail server and ultimately delivered to the subscriber’s inbox. Whitelists come in all shapes and sizes. Some are used internally to allow certain traffic to always be accepted, and others are public - meaning an organization will “certify” that the mail is not from a spammer. An example of a public whitelist is Sender Score Certification from Return Path.

Most major ISP’s also provide whitelisting, but not in the traditional method mentioned above. Typically, an ISP will allow an ESP to be on their whitelist. This means the ISP will know to expect a heavier volume of traffic coming from the IP addresses registered, and it also allows the ISP to take any complaints and forward them back to the ESP for removal.

Blacklists: In short, you want to avoid blacklists. A blacklist is a list of domains and IPs that, if listed, your email will face a greater challenge getting delivered to your subscriber’s inbox. Blacklists can be implemented differently, and it’s up to the organization using the blacklist to either reject the mail out right or maybe apply a higher level of content filtering to the email if there is a hit on the blacklist.

There are literally thousands of blacklists in the world today. Probably the two most widely known and heavily used blacklists are SpamHaus and what is commonly referred to as the multi list.

To make the most of your email marketing campaigns, it’s important to communicate with your email service provider to ensure you are set up on a whitelist (and also to make sure you’re not blacklisted!). Contact your ESP if you’re unsure of whether you’re on a whitelist or if you want to learn more about the topic. Your ESP’s job is to help you make the most of your email marketing activities, and ensuring a high rate of deliverability for clients should be a priority for them. If you’re a Blue Sky Factory client and have additional questions contact your account manager and we’ll be happy to help!

Stay tuned for the scoop on greylisting tomorrow.

The IT Department here at Blue Sky Factory has some exciting news, and we want to share!

Blue Sky Factory clients that participate in Sender Score Certification (SSC) will now have delivery benefits when sending to Yahoo! Mail. Considering most mailing lists are comprised of a large percentage of Yahoo! subscribers, this is very welcome news. Coming in the near future, our SSC clients will also enjoy enabled image and links at Yahoo!. With all of the SSC program benefits there really isn’t any reason not to be enrolled. Contact your account manager today for details.

To add to the good news, Yahoo! has reopened their feedback loop program. This means that our clients using domain keys can now be accepted into the Yahoo! feedback loop. If you are one of these clients, we will need your help when enrolling you into the program. Upon enrolling, a notification email will be sent to one of your role accounts (abuse@ or postmaster@) that contains a link. You must click the link to verify that you have control over that domain. That’s all you need to do, and we’ll take care of the rest! If you have questions about role accounts or need a refresher, click here for more information. We encourage you to set up role accounts as a best practice.

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.