Snow Balls

We had our first snow here in Denver over the weekend and even though it was expected, it came through in a night time sneak attack. Saturday was nice, hot, and sunny, but around midnight on Saturday the temperatures dropped and the snow was a flying.

The emails will be a flying pretty soon as I mentioned in our holiday preparation article in this month’s Thoughtspot. One recommendation and tool that I would strongly encourage using is our Spam Checker, which will help you in determining how “Spammy” your emails are looking. Obviously, the less “Spammy”, the better the delivery. So, spend some time tinkering with your emails and take advantage of the free Spam Checker to make sure your emails are looking their holiday best.

Top 10 Spammer Nabbed

This is great news for the email marketing industry - Top 10 Spammer Caught

I give you Spam

Happy Friday - Enjoy.

SPF Record Explained

You have heard me talk a little bit about SPF records and how they can increase email deliverability when using a third party email marketing service provider. Here is a little more insight into why this is important.

When you send an email through a third party solution like Swiftpage, you’re sending “from address” will be different than the actual address that the email is sent from as it is sent from the third parties servers. So the ISP of your email recipient will see the email is being sent from mail.xyzcorp.com, but it says that it’s coming from jon@acmecorp.com.

The ISP will reference your DNS and look to see if the sending server of mail.xyzcorp.com has permission to send with jon@acmecorp.com. If an SPF record is created authenticating the sending server to send on your behalf, the ISP will see the two domains as no different and no flags will be triggered as to whether your email is SPAM.

Creating an SPF record is fairly simple and we at Swiftpage will create one free of charge for our customers. Once the record is created, give it to your IT person and have them add it to the DNS for your domain.

If you have any questions regarding SPF authentication, please feel free to contact our support team at 877.228.8377 or support@swiftpage.com.

SPAM

Just what constitutes SPAM in an illegal sense?  What are the rules and regulations?  For a complete look at the CAN SPAM Act of 2003 see Spam Laws.  Here are the major points you must adhere to:

You must provide the ability to opt-out/unsubcribe from receiving further messages.
You must include a physical address.
You may not use deceptive subject lines - Subject lines that say one thing and the actul email content is another thing.

Keep yourself out of the Spam bucket by emailing to a permission based list with the quality content that they signed up to receive.  Ask your recipients to add you as a safe sender in their address book when they sign up to recieve your commincations.  Ask your email marketing service provider for a list of IP addresses that you may submit to Openspf.org and Microsoft’s Sender ID Framework, that tells ISP’s its ok that they are sending email on your behalf.