Suppresion List Categories

Your suppression List may contain the following categories of contacts:

• Bounce – email address considered undeliverable after three attempts which resulted in soft bounces
• Hard bounce – undeliverable email addresses
• Unsubscribed – unsubscribed contacts
• SPAM – contacts that reported your message as SPAM (gathered from FBL integrations with major ISPs )
• Uploaded – those directly uploaded into a Suppressed list by you (when new customers migrate to us from other ESPs)

In starting with a new email service it’s highly recommended to upload your current suppressed contacts into your Suppressed List. If you do this during migration you avoid sending of unwanted messages.

Removing Contacts from a Suppression List

As an marketer you can move contacts freely across all lists and segments. But often not to remove them from a Suppression List. For your own safety!

Why couldn’t you just move contacts from a suppress list to any active list? Because you have to respect every individual’s decision to subscribe to whatever source of information they want. It also makes it easier to be compliant with CAN SPAM Act. Similarly, uploading a list as “new”, should never be able to overwrite the earlier suppressed email addresses.

In case a contact wants to be removed from a Suppress List back to an active list, they will have to subscribe again. For instance using one of the Web forms you define.

In some cases, when you feel very strongly that a suppressed contact shouldn’t have been suppressed, a support ticket to the vendor will do the trick. Customer service at the ESP may move the contact back to an appropriate list.

Manually unsubscribing contacts and updating your suppression list.

A marketing or business owner may want to manually suppress certain email addresses from getting marketing materials.
Think about unwanted email subscribers like competitors, disgruntled ex-customers, known spammy domains / bots.

Depending on your email marketing tool, you could set up exclusion rules, upload a list or by navigating to that contacts profile page and pressing the “Unsubscribe” button.

The post What is a Suppression List? appeared first on ExpressPigeon.

What is DMARC?

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. DMARC is yet another technology that ISPs and ESPs use to ward off SPAM in addition to SPF and DKIM.

DMARC record is a configuration of a domain record that tells the receiving computer what to do with messages if they are coming from a computer with a different domain compared to the one specified on the “Reply To” field.

For instance, at we configured our DMARC policies such that if someone else sends an email from their computer (which cannot have our domain), but set the Reply To as: “jack.the.intruder@expresspigeon.com”, then the accepting computer should report this incident to us.

So far so good? Well DMARC – has been used sparingly for some time. Different companies were doing pretty much the same as us: just reporting these incidents. A lot of companies however, haven’t implemented DMARC.

How does DMARC affect email marketers?

If you are sending emails from your email service providers servers (or if you are using any ESP), and you use your personal Yahoo! (or AOL) email as a “Reply To”, then most ISPs like Microsoft, Google etc will simply reject your emails because Yahoo asked them to!

The solution to this is to use your corporate email address. Yahoo! and AOL logic is easy to understand: they provide free email service to individuals. It is tough to get big volume sending through personal accounts right, and send mass emails through outlook for instance.

If an email address they provide is also used to send mass emails from another ESP, than this is kind of a violation of the agreement on your end (I’m not a lawyer, do not hold my feet to the fire:)). Instead of sending from miketheblogger@yahoo.com, you will have to switch to mike@miketheblogger.com to solve this problem.

Bottom Line

If you are sending mass email on behalf of your company, always use your corporate email for this. If you are a blogger, and represent yourself then take this opportunity to get your own domain and build a better brand for yourself! Happy emailing!

The post What is DMARC? and why do you need it in Email Marketing? appeared first on ExpressPigeon.