Tag Archive for 'smtp'

5 Things to Do Soon After Sending your Newletter

Published on May 25, 2011 in Tips & tricks. 1 Comment Tags: bounces, newsletter, smtp, spam folders.

…so you have just hit the “send” button. It may take a few minutes or even hours to send out your newsletter to your mailing list. Here is what you can do while waiting:

1. Check your email addresses
If you have added one or more email addresses that you own to your list (that’s a good practice!), verify what your emails look like on both webmail and email clients. Check junk/spam folders to make sure your emails do not end up in those folders. It may sound obvious but…be sure also to check your email subject line!

2. Inform your colleagues
It might also be useful to send your newsletter or DEM to team members, or to other company departments, in order to keep your colleagues updated on the campaign’s marketing activities.
This may avoid the risk of two or more corporate functions providing clients with different information.

3. Start monitoring bounces
Make sure bounces are limited (or, even better, that there are none) and that they represent a small percentage of the emails sent up to that point. This check may be very useful, since if the percentage of bounces is very high, clearly something is wrong.

4. Check delivery stats
If you have a dedicated smtp service, or any other service allowing you to monitor sent emails, you may want to check delivery status and speed. Some services will even alert you in real time when an email is opened.

5. Take a break
In all likelihood, the tension, stress, or fear of making mistakes you have accumulated in the past 5 minutes may overshadow the next 5 months…Well, it’s time to leave your desk and go look for that well-deserved cup of coffee. Or maybe this is the point where you realize you’ve made some awful blunder – in that case, the break will have to wait…

Related post: Stop and think before you hit “send”

You’re not a spammer, so don’t let your emails get blocked by mistake!

Published on January 14, 2010 in Tips & tricks. 2 Comments Tags: smtp, spam, spam filters.

These days, the majority of email servers have an automatic spam filtering service. These spam filters are quite intelligent, but sometimes they can make mistakes and delete (or send to the spam box) completely valid emails. This is a very common problem, particularly with free or low cost email accounts. If you think that a lot of your emails are being filtered into the spam box by mistake, here are some simple tips to follow to avoid being classified as a spammer:

1. Always include a “pure text” section: even if they are written in an HTML format, personal emails always automatically include a section of pure text. If they don’t, the majority of spam filters flag them up as suspicious. After you have finished writing an email, use the SendBlaster “HTML Text” button to automatically create a pure text section from the HTML code.

2. Write, don’t draw: the main body of the message must be text. Avoid inserting too many images or images which make your email too large. Once again, spam filters can become suspicious if there appears to be more image than text.

Continue reading ‘You’re not a spammer, so don’t let your emails get blocked by mistake!’

Free and Paid SMTP Services

Published on January 13, 2010 in Recommended links and Sendblaster. 1 Comment Tags: isp, sendblaster smtp, smtp.

“What SMTP service do you suggest to use with SendBlaster?” This is a question that customers often ask us.
We continue to emphasize that good email marketing needs good SMTP service. In these times there is a wide choice of free SMTP services, offered by different ISPs, hosting companies and Webmail providers. The point is that they do not always perform well. Moreover they usually place a limit on the number of emails you can send within a certain time period and they can change their outbound email policy at any time without any prior notification.

If you send out small mailings and you are not concerned over poor performances they could represent a valid solution. If you do frequent or large mailings, and you find out that lots of messages being not delivered or filtered as spam, you should consider a dedicated third party SMTP service. It’s the best technical choice and, used with a desktop mailer as SendBlaster, is still much cheaper than any ESP. To meet these needs we have partnered with SMTP.com, the world’s oldest and most trusted email delivery provider, and created SendBlastersmtp.com. By using this professional service don’t have to guess whether your deliveries will go through. Configuration is easy and you’ll be able to get your mailing out no matter what the circumstance.

How To Speed Up Email Delivery?

Published on November 24, 2009 in General and Sendblaster. 0 Comments Tags: email delivery speed, internet connection, smtp.

Is it possible to increase the speed at which my e-mails are sent ? This is a question we receive from our users on a regular basis. Our answer is yes it is, but it depends on a few factors. Today we would like to focus on them.

The “weight” of the message
Each e-mail message that SendBlaster sends, like any message sent through e-mail, has a “weight”.
What is “message weight”? The term “weight” is improper, but it is commonly used to describe the size of a file (a text, a picture, filmed content, or in our case, an e-mail message).
The size of the file is measured in bytes, though for convenience the terms Kilobyte (KB), Megabyte (MB), Gigabyte (GB), etc., are used.

The weight depends on the quantity of information in the file. This increases with various factors such as the length of the text, the size and quality of an image, or the length of a film, to give you a few examples.

Simply speaking, we can say that a text, even if it is long, is generally not very heavy. Images and films, however, are decidedly heavier than a simple text. For example, an e-mail message “weighs” 3 KB, and an image weighs 1 MB. E-mail messages consisting of only text, even of considerable length, are usually very light, while those containing graphics such as pictures are heavier.

The speed of your Internet connection
How does the weight of the message affect its delivery speed?

Continue reading ‘How To Speed Up Email Delivery?’

What Is Your Email Reputation?

Published on November 2, 2009 in Tools. 1 Comment Tags: deliverability, ip reputation, isp, smtp.

A good habit to follow before sending your bulk email is to look up the IP reputation of your SMTP service.
IP reputation is the major contributor to delivery rates, especially if you are sending to the largest ISP’s, e.g. Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail. Statistics show that 83% of the time, sender reputation is the real cause of filtering: by monitoring it you will be able to identify problems affecting your sender reputation, determine the causes, and fix them.

Here are some of the major metrics ISPs look at when managing the message sent into their system:
- volume of emails (illegitimate bulk mail do normally trigger spam filters)
- spamtraps hits (old inboxes that ISPs reactivate specifically to trap spammers )
- invalid address rates (hard bounces)
- complaints rates (how often recipients hit the “report spam” button to response to your message)

The good news is that there are some online services that let you check your IP reputation. We recommend these four Free ones:

Continue reading ‘What Is Your Email Reputation?’

Don’t Be Filtered Out as Spam!

Published on September 14, 2009 in Tips & tricks. 1 Comment Tags: antispam, direct send, smtp.

Nowadays most mail servers have built-in antispam filters. They are quite smart, but sometimes they fail and delete (or mark as spam and redirect to some “spam” folder) perfectly legal messages; this is a common problem with Hotmail and other very popular free mail services. If you feel a lot of your messages are filtered out and not delivered, here are some basic rules to avoid being named a spammer by mistake:

1. Always include plain text: “personal” e-mail messages, even if written using HTML format, always include a plain text part. If a plain text part is missing, most antispam filters become suspicious. When you finish composing your message, use SendBlaster’s “Text from HTML” button to automatically create a plain text part from HTML.

2. Write, don’t paint: most of your message must be text; avoid including large images. Once again, antispam filters become suspicious when the image / text ratio is too high.

Continue reading ‘Don’t Be Filtered Out as Spam!’