Look what we found on Deliverability.com - a Christmas poem dedicated to email deliverability.

We thought it might make for some amusing reading amongst all that last-minute xmas mailer sending to your subscribers.

Remember: Santa Claus delivers, and so does GraphicMail! Stand a chance to win an iPod Touch with GraphicMail this Christmas.

Still looking for a snazzy or nostalgic seasonal template? Look no further - pick one of our FREE xmas templates when creating your GrahpicMail newsletter.

‘Twas the month before Christmas, when all through the land,

marketers were scheming to hit year-end plans.


Their e-mails were designed in great detail and care,

in hopes that all of their customers soon would be there.


Mail the entire list. Mail them all!

Mail away! Mail away! Mail away all!"


The executives were nestled all snug in their beds,

with visions of Q4 revenue dancing in their heads.


When back in the office arose such a clatter,

that delivery support ran to see what was the matter?


Away to their reporting tools they flew like a flash,

investigating each client’s mailing to look for the trash.


The data before them on the newly sent mail

gave all indications of why they did fail.


When what to their wondering eyes should appear,

but a slew of bounce codes that no one would endear.


Unknown User! Inactive Account! Mailbox Doesn’t Exist!

Blocks from the ISPs were hard to resist.


If only they’d listened and segmented their data.

Their mailing would have been delivered,  staying off of the ISP’s radar.


Relevance, hygiene, permission and more,

ultimately gets the campaign safely out the door.


Reach out to your clients now and give them a shout.

Make sure they understand what this is all about.


Eliminate unknown users, non-responders, and hard bounces alike, and watch delivery and response rates soar and spike.


It is important to take heed of this trustworthy advice,

because the ISPs know if you’re naughty or nice.


During this important mailing season we must get it right.

Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good-night!

GraphicMail is now a member of the Return Path Certification program. Our email practices have been audited and approved by Return Path. We are part of the largest, most respected whitelist program in the industry. As a program member, we are part of a network of trust that covers more than 1.3 billion mailboxes!

Internet Service Providers are changing their spam filters. How does this impact you, the legitimate email marketer? In their exclusive report , Pivotal Veracity recently highlighted the fact that domain-based reputation has arrived.  A number of top ISPs including Yahoo and AOL are said  to augment IP-based reputation systems with portable domain-based reputation systems for those mailers using DK/ DKIM authentication. This means, ISPs will “attach” your spam complaint rate, unknown user rate, and spam trap rate to your domain, in addition to your IP.  So even if you switch IP addresses, you get to keep your domain-based reputation – for good or bad.

So what can you do to make sure emails get delivered?
First of all, reputation is and will remain of your own doing  To get  reputation you need to be using a domain in your “from” address that links to you.  That means don’t use generic domains like (@hotmail.com or @gmail.com) as your from address.   If you are not already start using an email address with a domain that you control that you can begin to create a reputation for.  For example, if your email address was james@wyofarm.com  your reputation would be calculated on past and current behavior on the sends originating from the domain wyofarm.com and not just a IP  address which relates to the server from which the email originated and not the sender from which it originated.  This will make each sender more responsible for the delivery rate of their mailings.   Both Yahoo and AOL  are moving towards this structure and will probably be in full swing at the beginning of next year.  Other ISPs will follow suit.

How can we help you build your reputation?
If PivotalVeracity is right then having your FROM domain properly authenticated, will become increasingly important.   So if you haven’t already implemented DKIM on your domain, it’s time you consider doing it.  DKIM is a process that uses public-key cryptography to guarantee that the from sender is actually the domain owner.  To implement it the sender attached an electronic signature to the email that is then matched against a signing module saved at the DNS.   If you don’t know how to generate the keys the public and private keys needed to implement DKIM, then will GraphicMail's tool will create them for you.

What else are we doing?
Almost all ISPs now base whether or not they will deliver emails to client’s inboxes on some ratio of the complaint rates they receive from their clients against sends originating  from IPs or domains.  ISPs share these with ESPs using feedback loops.  So every time a client clicks on the ‘this is spam’ in their email client they let us know that that client didn’t want to receive the message.

We help them close the opt-out loop by unsubscribing these clients.  We mark those as complaints against the client’s account so they’re aware that not everyone that has received their mail is happy with it and we make the ISPs happy by reducing the amount of unwanted email being sent to their users and as a result they accept more of our mails

When it comes to achieving high rates of delivery, we need to all understand that Email Service Providers (ESPs) cannot be held solely responsible for delivery issues. The majority of delivery issues are caused by the ESP users and email marketers themselves, knowingly as well as unknowingly. Matt Blumberg, CEO & Chairman of ReturnPath, refers to Ken Magill when stating that it is a myth that deliverability is controlled by the ESP – it is controlled by the marketer. Ken Magill further comments that the client can impact on deliverability with the right “data collection, data hygiene, frequency and relevance. The main factors that affect deliverability are all within the list owner’s control”.

Delivery issues

We think that the majority of delivery issues come from bad list acquisition and bad list management.  Delivery issues such as “mailbox unknown”, “domain unknown” and “complaints” can be directly attributed to the users’ actions. Sometimes, a simple misspelling can lead to email being returned (domain or mailbox unknown); much more often, however, the mail is returned because the subscriber didn’t feel they had given their permission to be on the list.

Clean lists

Some email marketers become too greedy when acquiring lists and buy lists or scrape the net for any random email address that fits their marketing segment. This has created an army of elite spammers – users who buy lists are usually much more likely to get blocked and thrown off a sending server as they are not hard to spot.

Having a good opt in list saves time and money and improves delivery in the long run.  Also, remember that subscribers change their preferences from time to time – we recommend you send occasional emails asking subscribers to update their profile. This way, if someone is not interested in receiving your newsletter anymore, they will unsubscribe from it immediately.  It will also give you the opportunity to shift them to a more targeted list which will communicate directly to them thereby deepening your relationship with the subscriber.

Clean content

Remember the content of subject lines and the email itself are very important in reminding subscribers that they have given their permission.  Content should be clean and not contain any words that are regarded as spam. Do a spam check before sending your next email newsletter.  But also, send content that is in line with what your subscriber has asked for.

The quality of your list and the content of your email are the two largest components that ensure delivery of your email into your subscriber’s inbox.  So remember to review your practices to make sure you’re not your own worst enemy.

Are you not quite sure about all these email deliverability terms? We found this really good glossary by Mark Brownlow.