What is whitelisting?

Whitelisting is the process of configuring a spam filter to exempt certain email messages from being filtered or rejected. In this case, it means configuring your own corporate email server in such a way that important email campaigns you send via eMail Networks  don’t end up getting rejected for delivery by your own mail system.

Why do I have to whitelist my own email messages?

Previously, email messages with your from address or domain were probably only sent from a mail server located on your internal networks. Spam filters usually only expect that email from your domain will come from this existing, internal mail server. Email messages that claim to be from you—but actually come from any other server outside your network—are more likely to be blocked as spam, spoof, or phishing email. Some filters also reject email messages that have the same domain name in both the “from” and “to” addresses in the headers if the messages did not originate inside your existing internal network.

Spammers love to dress up their email messages to look like they originated from somewhere they didn’t. Many companies protect themselves by allowing email from their own domain, but only if it comes from the company’s mail servers. If that wasn’t the case, it would be easy for someone to create an email message that appears to be from the head of your company telling everyone to take the day off with pay. They could send it from any mail server and fool the recipients. You’d likely be none the wiser and head home—and chaos would reign supreme.

How do I whitelist my email messages sent from the eMail Networks system?

• Contact our office to determine your eMail Networks sending IP address and domain. If you have a private IP address and/or a private domain—or if you’re not sure—contact your technical service manager who will be able to provide you with that information.

• If you don’t have a private IP address or domain from us, your sending IP address will vary based on system volume. You can try whitelisting the individual IP address that the system is using to send your messages, but there’s no guarantee that mail you send tomorrow will originate from the same IP address as it did today.

• Alternately, you can whitelist our public sending IP’s. Your IT department will likely understand how they’re to be used.  Please contact our support team at (866) 271-5908 to confirm which IP addresses you need to whitelist.

• Consult the manual for your spam filter—or with your IT department—on how to configure your filter’s whitelist, using all of the information gathered above. You will need to whitelist the sending IP addresses (or network blocks) as well as your private domains (if any).

Do I absolutely have to do this?

Not necessarily. Some spam filters are smarter than others and this is not always an issue. Feel free to skip this process until and unless you find that you have an issue receiving copies of your own email messages.

Doesn’t this mean that everybody else will have problems receiving my mail?

No. This only applies to how spam filters work when sending email messages “from yourself, to yourself.” This is specific to clients sending to themselves and is an issue completely unrelated to successfully delivering mail to the regular recipients on your email list.

How do I ensure that everybody else on my email list will receive the email messages I send with the eMail Networks system?

The most important best practice is do not send spam. Permission is the key to successful inbox delivery. Companies and Organizations that send mail only to recipients who have explicitly requested to receive that mail are the most successful at getting their email messages delivered.

Contact our support team to learn more about the tools and expertise we have to measure your current “deliverability” and help you investigate and fix any problems you might encounter.

What is an email Bounce?

Bounces are messages that ISPs send back to Critical Impact to explain why they can’t deliver your email to the email address you sent it to. Once you send an email, the recipient’s email server either accepts your message, or “bounces” it. If the recipient’s email server accepts your message, the recipient’s email address remains active in Critical Impact. If the recipient’s email server rejects your message, we consider this a bounce. There are two kinds of bounces – one is temporary, and one is permanent.  We’ll explain how each of those work in the next section.

The Soft Bounce (temporary bounce) – The email address is valid, but the message couldn’t be delivered to it, most likely due to a temporary encumbrance.

A soft bounce occurs when the recipient’s email server rejects your email message due to a temporary condition that exists on the receiver’s side, e.g. perhaps their inbox is full and not accepting any new messages. When a soft bounce occurs, Critical Impact will retry sending your email to the intended recipient every 60 minutes for 24 hours, which totals 24 attempts. Only after the system makes the 24 attempts does a ‘bounce’ appear in your tracking report.

The 24 re-tries do not count as bounces or additional sent emails.  Instead, 24 unsuccessful retries equate to one soft bounce. The following table describes the possible causes of a soft bounce.

It is important to note that soft bounces are not controlled by our system or by you, our customer.  Soft bounces are entirely dictated by the intended recipient’s email servers.

Soft Bounces can also be caused by poor sender reputation and/or issues stemming from too many bounces, too many complaints, or sending SPAM.  This type of soft bounce is called a “block bounce”.  It occurs when the email server rejects your message due to filtering issues, such as URL blocks, complaints, lack of proper authentication, or the domain or IP address is found on a blacklist utilized by the receiving domain. A subscriber who receives a block bounce will be re-tried in the next email send.   The following table describes the causes of a block bounce.

Soft bounces can also be caused by technical issues. This flavor of soft bounce, also called a technical bounce, occurs when the recipient’s email server rejects your message due to technical errors, such as a data format or network errors. When a subscriber experiences a technical bounce they will be re-tried in the next email send. The following table describes the causes of a technical bounce.

The Hard Bounce

A hard bounce occurs when the email server rejects your message due to permanent conditions (this typically results when an email address no longer exists, or is inactive). No more attempts are made to send this email campaign to this subscriber, and the subscriber will be automatically unsubscribed from all future email attempts.  While this model suits most cases, certain ISPs change from time-to-time based on how they handle spam and a number of other deliverability items.
The following table describes the possible causes of a hard bounce.

Bounce Tracking

We track your bounces in the tracking area of the application. To access your bounce tracking data, follow these steps:

1. Click the Reports folder.
2. Click Custom Reports.
3. Select Display All Hard and Soft Bounces by Date.
4. Click Run Report

We take bounces very seriously. Poor delivery results from any of our customers damages the reputation of the company and, by extension, all of our customers. Therefore, the Sending Guidelines and Thresholds are in place to prevent abuse of our email system and to ensure our clients practice permission-based, opt-in email. We continue to lead the industry in deliverability rates – due in part to our commitment to, enforcement of, and client consultation on permission marketing best practices.

SPAM filters have become increasingly complex in order to identify which emails are from legitimate senders which are not.  Spam filters look at a long list of criteria to decide whether your email is spam.  Also, spam filters are very private about why your email passed or failed to try to prevent spammers from figuring out their techniques.

Typically, there is not one single change that can be made in order to let your email pass a spam content filter.  Instead, most filters use a scoring system, if you score high enough, they block your email.  Having !!! in the subject may be 10 points, and having a high image to text ratio could be 24 points!  Once you are over a certain score, your email is blocked.  There are 100’s of spam filters, each with their own unique settings.

Reasons a message could land in the SPAM or junk folder

Subscriber Engagement

• AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and other major email clients use subscriber engagement to filter spam
  1. The more your recipients open, click, and read your messages, the more highly engaged your audience
  2. The more engaged your audience, the more likely your messages are to land in the inbox
  3. If your subscribers are not engaged, the message could be filtered as spam
• Email providers don’t share exact filtering data with senders. But by tracking your campaigns’ opens, clicks, and unsubscribes, you’ll be able to gauge how your subscribers are engaging with your messages

Subscribers click “report spam” button

• One of the greatest marks against you if you’re having trouble getting into the inbox will be if your email content has been previously flagged as spam by your subscribers
• If a lot of your recipients click the “report spam” button against your messages, their email client can start to block your campaigns and deliver other messages straight to the spam folder
• If subscribers move emails out of the spam folder, that’s a positive indicator and can help ensure future emails that are similar are delivered to the inbox instead.

Subscribers No Longer Wish to Receive Messages

• A frequent sending pattern might be tolerated initially, but eventually subscribers may tire of the frequency and start marking your mail as spam
• To prevent this, you may want to adopt engagement based sending

List Hygiene

SPAM Traps

• Spam Traps are email addresses that are used by a blacklist to test if the email address was obtained by a bot crawling for email addresses.  If you send to a SPAM trap email address, the SPAM filters will know that you did not receive this address through a valid opt-in
• Purchased lists can contain many dead emails and spam traps that quickly inform mailbox providers that you are sending unsolicited emails
• To avoid including a SPAM trap email in your mailing list, use an opt-in process to obtain your subscribers and do not buy lists

Unsubscribes

• If the unsubscribe link is not prominently displayed in the message or the message footer, some subscribers choose to mark as SPAM instead of unsubscribing

Subject Line

• Misleading claims could make the message look suspicious: the subject line needs to correlate with the content of the message.
  Example: the subject line states that the recipient has won a prize, while the copy lists conditions that have to be met in order to claim it.
• Your subject contains trigger words or excessive punctuation (FREE!!!!)
• Exclamation marks are especially risky in email subject lines

From Address

• A free email address as your from address can trigger SPAM filters
  1. Avoid using a free/personal email address such as @hotmail.com or @gmail.com
  2. Instead, use an email domain for the company or organization for which you are sending email
  3. Make sure to use a working email address that can receive messages
• Your from address needs to be recognizable and trustworthy to external audiences: if subscribers do not recognize the address, they may mark the message as SPAM before opening it
• No from address or noreply@ since this looks like spam and will increase the likelihood of your email being filtered.
• Frequent changes of from address names
• Obscure from address field names or from addresses that do not exist

Message Content

Word Choice

• There is no complete list of spam trigger words, but you can try testing various text and avoid the risky words listed below.
• Be careful with words associated with the language of sales. If overused, they may trigger spam filters and route your emails to junk folders. Risky words include: prize, free, bonus, buy, purchase, order, guarantee, credit card, sex
• Anything about getting money, paying less money, or money-back guarantees may be marked as SPAM
• Excessive use of “click here.”  Make your call-to-action links more specific to avoid filters.
• Don’t forget to use spell check; misspellings are yet another spam indicator in your email content

Font Styles

1. Font Colors

   • Do not use too many different font colors (especially red or green)
   • Since red is a loud color and can be hard to read, it may cause your message to be caught in an email filter

2. All Capital Letters

   • Using all capital letters MAKES IT LOOK LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING, makes your email look like spam, and will dramatically increase the likelihood of your email being filtered
   • When emphasis is needed, use a maximum of one word per sentence in all capitals, never a whole sentence

3. Extraneous Styles

   • Make sure your content does not include styling from Microsoft Word. If you are pasting in content from Word, you will want to use the “Paste from Word” button in the message editor to avoid having extra styling tags pasted along with the text

4. Font Size

   • Using extra large font size could trigger a filter.  Ordinary font size is considered 10-14px

Excessive Punctuation Marks or Symbols

• !!! or ??? or $$$ are likely to trip email filters especially when used in conjunction with spam-like words and capital letters.
• One exclamation mark per sentence is enough

Links

• Spam filters check the links in your message. If you link to a domain that has a poor reputation you will be penalized.
• Check that the links in your message are valid.
• As a best practice, please avoid shortened URLs in emails because spammers frequently abuse them. Some shortened domains have been placed on some of the most widely used block lists, which means that emails containing these links can be blocked by a spam filter
• Linking to too many different domains in an email could make the message look suspicious
• Additionally you should avoid linking to URL’s that contain folders with 1-2 characters, because some filters will see that as a bad thing

Unsupported Content

• Javascript, form code, or embedded video within your email could flag the message as SPAM
• Sending attachments with the message

Images

• Good text to image ratio: it’s suggested that for every graphic, include at least two lines of text
• Do not send any image-only emails
• Optimize images: this will shrink the overall size of the message

Message Length

• An email with no content in the subject and body of the message might be classified as spam.
• Keep emails short because too much copy is another red flag for spam filters.

Email Versions

• Include both a HTML and text version of your email.  Not having a text only version of the message could trigger a SPAM filter
• Note: our system automatically generates a text version from the text inserted into the message tab of the message editor.  Just make sure that if your message contains only images, you add some text to the text only tab.

Incomplete Information

• Your physical address is required by law. Always include your reply email address and your Web site URL, if you have one. Depending on your business, you may decide to include your phone number as well.
• Your physical address is added by default to the message footer.  If you use a custom footer make sure to add the physical mailing address to this footer of elsewhere in the message content