A lot of business email senders are wondering just what Gmail's new "tabs" feature, now turned on by default for all Gmail users, means for delivery of the commercial email that they send. Will marketing email now go by default into the 'Promotions' tab, where Gmail users will probably rarely look? Will email go to the promotions folder instead of the spam folder? Just what will be the effect of Gmail tabs for email senders?
As we've talked about at length before, web-based email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, take into account the open rates and click-through rates associated with the email that you send to their users. If your rates are too low, they will start putting your email in the spam folder. But in addition to the obvious concerns and issues related to open rates, there is another aspect of these web-based mail providers - and Gmail in particular - to which nobody gives a thought, even though it is quietly killing email deliverability for countless legitimate, ethical email marketers and other email senders.
"Never use a 'do not reply' email address" is something that we seem to have been saying for years (because we have). Today we are repeating it, hot on the heels of a real-life example, a retail mini-saga that unfolded for us with a large, well-known online retailer. The saga could have been easily downgraded to a minor glitch, had it not been for the fact that we kept receiving what seemed to be quite urgent, even strident, emails, all from a "do not reply" email address, and with no other way to respond to the email (no alternate email address, no phone number, zip, zero, zilch). It serves as a good reminder that not only can "do not reply" email addresses be incredibly frustrating (especially if some sort of alternate communication option is not provided), but they can also affect your email deliverability, especially when "no reply" email addresses are in fact non-existent email addresses.
We wanted to do a mid-year check-in to remind you to make sure that your emailing practices are staying in tip-top shape, and that your email marketing campaigns were minding their p's and q's to ensure maximum deliverability.
We are pleased to offer our newest resource page, "How to Find Your Full Email Headers in AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Mozilla, Apple Mail and More!"
This resource features a full explanation of what an email header is, and why it may be being asked for, along with full instructions for finding email headers in Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, Excite, Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla, and Apple Mail, with more to come!
Back when it was first discovered that spammers were scraping WHOIS registrations for email addresses, private registration of domains became popular among legitimate businesses. Unfortunately, like so many other things, registering your domain privately (meaning that your domain registration information is essentially cloaked, and anonymous to the world) has been adopted and thus ruined by the spammers, phishers, and malware pushers of the world. Now, if you are a legitimate sender, having a privately registered domain will hurt your email deliverability.
SMTP codes can be so confusing, especially those SMTP response codes and SMTP error codes like the dreaded SMTP error 550. These are often returned in bounced email, such as "550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable" or "550 5 2 1 mail from refused spam site." They are in response to SMTP commands that have 'gone wrong' between your email server that sent the email, and the receiving email server that is unable to deliver it (or refuses to deliver it) for some reason. But what exactly do they mean? Why should you care and what should you do? And why do we say that SMTP error 550 is dreaded?
Today I want to let you know about another free resource that we offer to the general public along with our customers: a free tool that allows you to determine whether your reverse DNS (rDNS) is set up properly.
