8 ms·
HelloInbox – Ultimate email deliverability checklist and toolkit
- maccard 4y agoThis is why I don't run my own email server. This stuff is table stakes for email services, and there is no leeway for getting any of it wrong, otherwise your mail doesn't send (and you don't get notfied)
- marban 4y agoMTAs are only one part of the email deliverability trauma.
- snorremd 4y agoOn the other hand. Mail delivery services like Mailchimp and Sendgrid often see blocks of their IP address spaces ending up in IP blacklists because their services are prone to temporary abuse by bad actors. So even if you get a personal IP address on the service it might be blocked. At that point you still need to take manual action. Some spam list distributors are borderline extortive in nature and will demand a fee to remove you from such a blacklist, and might not even consider removing you if you are using a specific third party SMTP relay service. I guess mail delivery is just hard regardless of whether you are hosting it yourself or using a commercial relay service.
- lowwave 4y agostart a server with static ip and start ip warming! Send email only for your purpose. That is the only way to send email now days.
- snorremd 4y agoI think this is good advice. The overhead in operations to host and maintain a custom setup is non-negligible, but at least you might get better delivery rates. One of the annoying things about the commercial relays is that the reported delivery rates can't be trusted as they are based on the receiving server actually reporting accurate responses. In lots of cases the receiving server, if suspecting a spam email, will just report that they received the email and then pass it straight into the proverbial shredder. So while a relay might say you have 99% delivery rate, the actual number might be closer to 90% and you would never know unless your customers complain about missing emails.
- technothrasher 4y agoNot all IPs are equal. I run two separate email servers which are almost identically set up. One for my business and one for my personal use, both with negligible outgoing email traffic (less than 50 emails a day). My business server is with a quality ISP who cares about their network and deliverability is fine. The other, for my personal use, is on a cheapo VPS provider and the IP gets blacklisted enough because of neighboring IPs in the /24 sending spam that I now relay all of my emails through Sendgrid in order to get any kind of reasonable deliverability.
- jevgeni 4y agoSurely, if it's that difficult to send out your marketing emails, maybe people don't want to get marketing emails?
- 867-5309 4y agothis also applies to subscribers and those who need to see your emails
- dmje 4y agoBoth halves of your sentence work but collectively the logic you've inferred is questionable...
- jevgeni 4y agoIf you need to go through a huge checklist of things to do to differentiate yourself from spam, then guess what?...
- Godel_unicode 4y agoThe spam problem has gotten really bad and therefore everyone no matter their circumstances needs to bend over backwards to prove they're not spam?
- ismaelyws 4y agoKind of, yes. From how I understand it, Authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, PTR, et) and Reputation (Good domain & IP score) just informs ESPs that you're who you say you are and you're not abusing their network.
- _glsb 4y agoThat problem is easily solved with client-side whitelists (ala hey.com). However, that would also mean the death of all "legitimate" marketing emails. All the hoops you have to jump through are there either as a form of identity validation (which is fair) or because the industry wants to allow SOME unsolicited emails through.
- _wldu 4y agoWho needs to send 20,000 emails per hour? Other than spamming people, who actually needs to do that?
- khorne 4y agoTransactional mail alone can reach that volume easily.
- ismaelyws 4y agoExactly, think of all the transactional emails companies like Amazon or Stripe send out on an hourly basis.
- pech0rin 4y agoPlenty of services could use that. Think of any large scale service that does email notifications.
- lbriner 4y agoA large business who gets 20K customer service calls per hour and sends them a CSAT questionnaire? Whether or not you think it is good practice, it happens. Other scenario is a business that wants to invite a load of people to something at the same time so they are not sending that many every hour but e.g. tickets for a concert, you want everyone to get the same chance.
- Nextgrid 4y ago> sends them a CSAT questionnaire Exactly the thing nobody asked for and absolutely deserves to be marked as spam.
- ismaelyws 4y agoYup exactly. I just read a thread on Twitter the other day about a company in NYC (can't remember the name) where they sent an email about an event happening the same week. Their customers (double opt-in) never received the email because most of them went to spam or promotions tab due to deliverability issues. It happens.
- leononame 4y agoYou can follow all these steps and still end up on blocklists. I run a personal mail server for me and my wife, and every now and then my IP ends up on some blocklist which sometimes even denies my delist requests. And if you're especially unlucky, you end up blocked on outlook.com and have to jump through endless hoops. Unless you're willing to out in the work, I wouldn't recommend hosting your own mail server.
- NavinF 4y ago> Week 1: 119 per hour Huh are people really getting such numbers? (Let alone 20,000 emails per hour) I’ve got a cabinet in a data center and an IP block, but I’ve been using gsuite for years because I assumed that >1 email/hour would result in >1% of my sent mail getting incorrectly flagged as spam. Is that not the case?
- khorne 4y agoNote that this checklist seems mostly aimed at people that send email professionally. Parts of it surely apply to individuals hosting their own email, volumes likely do not though.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y agoThe checklist seems to be for businesses sending newsletters and so on. Ramping up slowly is still a thing, though.
- ismaelyws 4y agoYes mostly for businesses sending newsletters or cold outreach. But parts of it also important for transactional emails (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc)
- petecooper 4y agoI like this. I'm not your target demographic for a sign up, but nicely presented and useful info. Nice!
- ismaelyws 4y agoThanks :) appreciate the feedback.
- pembrook 4y agoThe site recommends a dedicated IP for people sending 50,000 emails per month, but this number is way lower than what I’ve heard from experts before. I was told anything under 500,000+ emails per month and you might actually get worse deliverability from a dedicated IP vs. a shared IP at one of the big ESPs like mailchimp…since inbox providers like gmail/outlook see low volume IPs as suspicious (no idea why). I’ve also heard your domain reputation is far more important than shared vs. dedicated IP at your ESP of choice. Anybody know which advice is true?
- vgb2k18 4y ago>I’ve also heard your domain reputation is far more important than shared vs. dedicated IP at your ESP of choice. For me the IP address has been the only significant factor in my email deliverability. I.e., emails sent from my mail server couldn't reach Outlook inboxes or even spam boxes. Straight-up silently rejected every time. If you look at the Outlook.com Smart Network Data Services (SNDS)[0], the terminology used is all about IP. That problem was resolved through a support ticket requesting a kind conditional white-listing. That's been my experience so far, from the perspective of a low volume, personal email only. YMMV. [0] https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/ https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/
- albertgoeswoof 4y agoThere's no way to know, Google and the other big inbox providers don't reveal exactly how they do spam scoring, to avoid spammers from gaming it. You would hope they are using heuristics like domain reputation and email content over IP address reputation. That being said if you send from a new or rarely used IP, every inbox provider will greylist you at a minimum, which causes delays.
- ismaelyws 4y agoTrue, which is why it's important to "warm up" your IP and slowly ramp up volume over time.
- martinald 4y agoUnfortunately I've seen the complete opposite. We've had to purchase dedicated sending IPs for some of our clients that maybe send 50 emails a week. Why? Because these emails are super important transactional notifications and we constantly saw stuff getting blocked on shared IPs. It would work fine for a while then get RBLd causing major major issues. Sendgrid, sparkpost etc support all said the only solution was a dedicated IP with them. This does seem to work FWIW, but it's probably working out the same cost per send as sending a physical letter at this point!
- hrdwdmrbl 4y ago36 steps?
- ismaelyws 4y agoyah, it's tedious. This is basically everything I did to finally get decent open rates.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y agoThis checklist suggests listwashing, filtering out spam traps, and other practices, generally frowned upon. Do not purchase lists. Period. If you haven't ensured people have signed up themselves and using dual opt-in then the list is pretty much useless and should not be used. Any serious ESP will suspend accounts of customers sending mails to purchased lists.
- ismaelyws 4y agoI want to clarify that my checklist doesn't advocate for people to purchase lists. If someone is located in a jurisdiction that permits sending of unsolicited commercial mail, and they purchased a list then they should validate it. Validating also applies to contacts acquired through a single-opt in form (with a consent check) as some users will enter fake email address in order to download an ebook or free product. Though you can always send the download link in the email which forces people to use legitimate email address. But your point is well made, I should add a disclaimer, that users should comply with their countries laws and regulations when sending promotional email.
- ismaelyws 4y agoHave to disagree here. Companies do cold outreach and purchase leads all the time. From my experience as long as you clean your list, schedule batch delivery, personalize and comply with the CAN-SPAM At, ESP's will not block you.
- albertgoeswoof 4y agoThey should though. It's illegal in the EU/UK. However most ESPs won't block you unless it has an impact on them, they're getting paid per email sent, spam or not.
- chrismorgan 4y agoJust because people do something doesn’t mean they should. In that, I focus on what you might call ethics. But as for the legality aspect: Through most of the civilised world (at a minimum, those that I know of definitely: AU, NZ, all EU, UK, CA), sending unsolicited commercial messages at all is illegal, with very little in the way of exception or subtlety. The USA’s CAN-SPAM Act is the outlier, unusually permissive, by being largely opt-out rather than opt-in like everyone else. (And frankly it’s not at all uncommon for the USA to be an outlier in a bad way among first-world countries.) And taking the legality aspects further, it’s common for people to ignore restrictive laws that aren’t being particularly seriously enforced, and spam legislation is often like that around the globe. Just because lots of people are doing it doesn’t even mean it’s legal.
- vonunov 4y agoI thought this said "Hellinabox" and I was like, "yep"
- ismaelyws 4y agolol well the domain is available, you should buy it ;)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pch00 4y agoI use (& recommend) mxtoolbox's email health check: https://mxtoolbox.com/emailhealth https://mxtoolbox.com/emailhealth Not affiliated at all, just a happy user.
- ismaelyws 4y agoYep mxtools is pretty useful for checking blacklists. However, I prefer Email-Tester.com for their granular report.
- ismaelyws 4y agoCreator of HelloInbox here. A bit of context for those who are wondering. Frustrated with low open rates, I deep dived into email deliverability and discovered a lot I didn't know (and I'm in tech). Fixed and tested everything and tripled my open rates to 65-80%. As a side-project I decided to build a free checklist and toolkit for others to follow. My goal is to reduce complexity as much as possible and I think I've done to a degree but there's still a lot work to be done especially for people who aren't as tech savvy. If you think this can or cannot help you, please let me know, I'd like to know why.
- grafelic 4y agoSome feedback: "Helloinbox" should have an option to specify a DKIM selector. It is not correct to only check for a "default" DKIM selector, since any other selector is just as valid as "default", which in turn means the guide should also be updated to reflect this. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4871#section-3.1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4871#section-3.1