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TITLE PAGE

• WELCOME

Navigating Spam Filters and Improving
Email Deliverability
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Agenda

• Introduction
• Outsourcing vs. In-house
• Unsubscribe management
• Bounce Management
• Spam Overview
• How Spam filters work
• Practical steps to improve deliverability
• Sender authentication
• New developments on the Spam front
• Conclusion

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Outsourced vs. In-house?

• Decision depends on a number of factors including
  staffing, price and integration needs
  

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Outsourced vs. In-house?

• If opting for an outsourced solution consider the
  following criteria when evaluating a potential
  vendor
  
• Reputation and experience
• SPAM (blacklists, relationships with major ISP,
  SPAM policies, etc.)
  
• Put-through capacity (how many messages per hour
  can they deliver?)
  
• Ability to send various email formats (HTML,
  Text, AOL and Rich Media)
  
• Limitation on message size
• Security infrastructure and backup (how is your
  data being protected?)
  
• Additional services (subscription management,
  graphic design, landing pages etc.)

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Unsubscribe Management

• Critical to have a reliable unsubscribe or
  opt-out process
  
• Single Opt-out
• Recipient is unsubscribed after One Click
• Double Opt-out
• After unsubscribing recipient is asked to
  confirm that he/she wants to be unsubscribed
  
• If using an outsourced solution, make sure to
  integrate unsubscribes into your contact
  management database
  
• In addition to an unsubscribe process, create a
  Do Not Send To list
  

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Bounce Management

• Critical to have a bounce management procedure
• Some ISPs will flag you if you continuously send
  to bad email addresses
  
• Two different types of bounces
• Hard Bounce
• Generally a permanent failure (Hard bounces
  occur when a recipient email domain does not
  exist or there is no email server at that
  domain.) Soft Bounce
• Generally a transient failure (Soft bounces
  occur when a message is successfully delivered
  to a server but the server later rejects the
  message, usually because the mailbox is full or
  email address defunct.)

Over the course of just one month, one to three
percent of a subscriber base will typically turn
into hard bounces. On a day when servers are
congested, up to 25 of a large mailing can
return as soft bounces. (Source boogietools.com
)
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SPAM

• SPAM is the greatest challenge to the future of
  email marketing
  
• Brightmail, one of the leading anti-SPAM software
  companies, has projected at least half of all
  emails that individuals and businesses receive
  will be SPAM by September 2004
• Estimates range from 5-35 of legitimate email
  is being mistakenly blocked by SPAM filters
  
• Blocking of a good opt-in email is called a
  false positive.
  
• Very easy to get on blacklist difficult to get
  off

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SPAM

• ISPs and organizations employ filters to block
  out unwanted emails
  
• Blacklists
• Lists of alleged spammers that ISPs and
  organizations use to check incoming emails
  against
  
• Header Analysis
• Analyze the headers of an email to determine the
  origin and ensure that is not forged
  
• Volume Filters
• Filters based on large volume of email from one
  address to one domain
  
• URL Based Filtering
• Reject email with certain URLs
• Content Checking
• Sophisticated filters analyze the content of the
  message to determine if it is SPAM - specific
  language, specific phrases, subject line
  

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Tips to Improve Deliverability

• Run your email through a content checker to look
  for potential filter triggers
  
• Avoid sending attachments
• Do not include java script or other executable
  code in the email
  
• Be proactive send your mailing list a
  communication with technical specs and get
  whitelisted to ensure your email goes through
  
• Include technical sending spec on the
  confirmation page of your subscription page
  
• Establish relationships with top ISPs (AOL, MSN
  etc) if using an outsourced solution, make sure
  the vendor has well-established relationships
  
• Regulate the sending of large messages to large
  IPs

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SPAMTips to Improve Deliverability

• Ensure your list is opt-inalways use double
  opt-in method
  
• If renting a list or using other than a house
  list, ensure names are all opt-in
  
• Monitor your network if sending from your own
  servers, monitor your IPs to ensure you are not
  on any blacklists if using an outsourced
  solution, ask your vendor for their IP addresses
  
• You can check IPs for blacklists at the following
  websites
  
• Dnsstuff.com
• moensted.dk/spam
• Manage your bounced process ensure you are not
  sending emails to non-existent addresses
  
• Manage unsubscribe process reduce possibility
  of sending to a person who has unsubscribed
  

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CAN-SPAM

• While the CAN-SPAM Act has been enacted, key
  provisions are just now being interpreted by the
  Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

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CAN-SPAM

• New FTC proposal defining Primary Purpose will
  impact many e-mailers
  
• If a message is solely devoted to selling a
  product or service (e.g. promoting a product or
  service) it is considered commercial and
  therefore subject to CAN-SPAM.
• This requirement overrides any pre-existing
  relationship.
  
• Sending commercial messages is perfectly
  legitimate as long as
  
• Easy to use unsubscribe function
• Inclusion of physical address
• Inclusion of notice that message is an
  advertisement
  
• What about dual purpose messages, such as
  newsletters or legislative alerts? What if they
  contain advertisements?
  
• Test would a reasonable recipient conclude from
  the subject line or the body content that the
  primary purpose is commercial.

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CAN-SPAM

• What do I do to play it safe?
• Comply with the Acts provisions if a message is
  or may be- a commercial message
  
• Include a functioning opt-out mechanism and your
  physical address on all e-mails.
  
• Include notice that the e-mail is an
  advertisement. For example, consider adding a
  sentence such as This message is an
  advertisement directly above the unsubscribe
  line.
• Be meticulous about managing your unsubscribes.
  Dont send messages to recipients who have
  unsubscribed.
  

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Sender Authentication

• The Problem
• Todays email infrastructure has limited ability
  to verify the true source of an email. Spammers
  and fraudulent senders exploit these shortcomings
  and flood global email boxes with spoofed emails
  and deceiving email scams (phishing attacks).
• Proposed Solutions
• There are a number of Sender Authentication
  Proposals, which intend to add more thorough
  checks to the worlds email network to ensure
  that email servers can validate and verify that a
  message in fact came from where it claims to have
  been sent from.

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Sender Authentication

• 2 Key proposals
• Yahoos Domain Keys
• Email messages would be automatically signed by
  the email server from which they are sent. Using
  a cryptographic scheme known as public key
  cryptography, the receiving server could then
  check to see if the message really came from a
  valid system.

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Sender Authentication

• 2) Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
• SPF fights email address forgery and makes it
  easier to identify spam, worms, and viruses.
  Domain owners identify sending mail servers in
  DNS. Email servers verify the envelope sender
  address against this information, and can
  distinguish legitimate mail from spam before any
  message data is transmitted.

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• Thank you for participating!
• For more information about topics discussed
  during this Webinar, please contact
  us202-244-7845info_at_realmagnet.com