Are your emails reported as spam?

You manage email lists. Have you ever wondered why many of your emails get reported as spam? I had this situation recently and found it puzzling. All of the people on my email list were people who had definitely opted in to my list using industry standard "double opt-in" methods. What was surprising to me was that, even when people said they wanted my emails, they still complained about my message being "spam". This got me thinking about what was going on.

User reporting of spam

1. The message goes to a "spam" folder.
2. A notification of potential goes to one of the spam databases (e.g. SpamCop)

Email services refer to on line databases such as "SpamCop" to try and weed out spam before it reaches your in-box.

Consequences of reporting spam

There are consequences for you, as a sender of emails, when people hit the "report spam" button. This is best illustrated with an example.

Example

Let's say, for example, that I have 1,000 people on my email list. All of these people definitely want my emails. I know this because they opted in (twice) to my list. I go ahead and start sending emails to all of these people. Let's say the 1st 10 people who receive the email, have forgotten that they signed up to my list and decide to hit the "report spam" button in their email client. SpamCop now receives 10 "complaints" or flags that my email message may be spam. The remaining 990 emails now struggle to get delivered as Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo and everyone else look at the SpamCop database that shows my message could be a suspect for spam. Obviously this could have a big effect for both you as the email sender and for other people on you list who really do want to get your message.

Why do people report messages as spam?

I asked around my circle of friends and did some research on line. There are some obvious reasons as follows:

1. People simply forget that they signed up to your mailing list.
2. They are having a bad day with their email box receiving loads of other spam. Your message gets reported in the haste of frustration of having lots of junk mail.

In asking around, I found some reasons that were not so obvious to me:

1. The recipient of your message may no longer be interested in your subject matter. Rather than hit the "unsubscribe" button, they hit the "report spam" button. Why? Some reasons might include a general suspicion of "unsubscribe" links or perhaps that "report spam" buttons are generally more accessible (top of page) than "unsubscribe" buttons that are usually placed at the bottom of emails.
2. The person doesn't understand the technical differences between delete, unsubscribe, report as spam. One of my friends always hits the "report spam" button because "it stops any further similar messages being delivered" to her email box.

The 2 points above really surprised me but make perfect sense when you put yourself in the shoes of a not to technically aware internet user. The "report spam" button "just works". For those of us trying to run on line businesses that rely on emails for communication, we need to be aware and mange this as best we can.

Some ideas

I now believe that it is very likely that, for every emailing that I do, some people will always hit the "report spam" button. This is inevitable, it's just human nature. However, there are some things that I believe will greatly reduce the amount of people reaching for the "report spam" button:

1. Verified opt-in. This means that users need to double confirm that they definitely want to be added to my list.
2. Email regularly (but not too regularly). Generally, I try to keep mailings to not more that one a week. This way, people remember my mailings from the previous week but don't get annoyed with more frequent (e.g. daily) messages.
3. Transparent unsubscribe. I always have an unsubscribe link at the bottom of my messages. Perhaps I'll move these towards the top of the page.

Contact Checker Pro - product update

As many of you will be aware, we are working on a new product that validates email addresses in "bulk". Here is a quick update on where we are with this.

Progress

We've opted to offer this new service as a server based solution. This means that you simply upload your emails, we do the work and send you the results. This approach has many advantages including:

• No software for you do download, install and maintain
• Far more accurate validation results (see my previous post)

Server software

We currently have the core validation service completed and it runs sweet! In tests, we are able to validate thousands of email addresses per hour. Our server software is multi-thread and multi-server capable meaning that we can scale out to ensure that performance is not affected by demand.

We currently have the capability to validate campaigns / lists of several hundred thousand addresses.

Client / user interface

We also have the core of a basic user interface in place. From this interface, customers can manage their bulk validations. Here is what we have at the moment:

• Import emails to the system using copy/paste.
• Contact list that can be filtered by validation status ("Good", "Bad", "Blocked").
• Ability to export results to CSV, Word, Excel and PDF.
• The capability to email directly from the user interface using our rich text capable editor.

Offering

We are now putting the product proposition and pricing in place.

The product will be available on a one-off and a subscription model giving customers total flexibility on how to use the product in their business.

We'll be offering free trials together with low cost monthly plans to help businesses budgets in this tough economic climate.

We'll also be changing our pricing model for Contact Checker Pro (WebService) from annual to monthly.

Email address validation - are desktop validators worth the money?

Does your business use email to keep in touch with your customers?

If the answer is yes, you have probably already experienced the problems that arise from customers who don't have valid or current email boxes. Does the following sound familiar?

• Bounced emails or Non Delivery Receipts (NDR's)
• Having to manually update your customer newsletter list with every NDR from every newsletter or campaign

Desktop email validation

You might have considered using one of the many desktop products available for bulk email validation.

Perhaps you are thinking of purchasing one of these desktop products. If so, stop!

We have found these products simply can't provide accurate results.

The big problem with desktop software

Why are there issues? It's not any problem to do with the software itself but rather where it is being run from.

Checking email addresses for validation requires a 2 way "conversation" between the mail box you are checking and the software you are using to do the checking.

The problem comes when the server hosting the email box that you are checking. Due to the problems of spam, many email boxes use various methods to check for spam-like SMTP "conversations".

Your desktop email validation software will simply NOT work if:

• You are running it on a desktop with a dynamic IP assigned by your internet provider
• You do not have a reverse DNS entry for your IP
• You do not have valid DNS/SPF records for the IP running your desktop validation software.

We have found that the following large email providers do not support email validation from desktop software:

• Microsoft Live
• Gmail
• AOL

There are many others that we could cite but just these results alone should raise questions as to whether desktop email validators are worth the money.

Contact Checker Pro - the difference

We believe that the only way of doing email address checking with acceptable accuracy is using a server (service) based solution.

Contact Checker Pro (our server based email checker) is currently available as an XML web service and can be integrated into almost any software that you currently run.

Our new bulk email validation service will launch this spring and will allow unprecedented accuracy of validation for large lists of email addresses. We'll keep you posted!