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The technology business is exciting. When plans come together, it’s spectacular. When they don’t, you usually have a fireworks show followed by a burning crater.

The takeaway is that you’ve always got to be careful. It’s something that developers have driven into their heads from the time they start learning how to program. Be careful, always test. Then go back and test some more. You can never take for granted that what you developed today is going to work flawlessly with what you created last week, or year. So you test it. You get the idea.

One area of technology that is very underserved in the area of public information is email. 

Email is amazing. It’s one of the least expensive, yet most effective, ways of reaching potential buyers available, and has the highest ROI I’ve seen when executed properly.

We often talk about what happens “on stage” with email, but the tactical as far as content and deployment strategies is only part of the puzzle. There’s a whole lot more involved.

We’ve talked about reputation management for years now, and most folks know that harvesting positive reviews greatly impacts your bank account. Makes sense.

Email is much the same. Sort of. 

In the world of email, you as a sender have an online reputation. Not with end users, with ISPs (Internet Service Providers). ISPs are the entities that make the internet work, and as you might guess, it’s pretty important to stay on their good side.

Years ago, people referred to the internet as “the information super-highway,” and that’s actually a pretty accurate mental image to have. Think of the internet as a highway, and emails are traffic on it. Think of ISPs as the traffic cops of the highway, making sure things move along smoothly, and folks who shouldn’t be driving… aren’t. 

Keeping with our picture, imagine that half of the cars on the highway don’t belong there. That’s email spam. According to a spamlaws.com study, 45% of all emails are spam. It’s insane. The Radicati Research Group did a study that shows email spam cost businesses $20.5 BILLION in 2012 due to lost productivity and technical expenses. It’s actually more than the estimated earnings of spammers. Radicati also suggests that based on growth rates, the cost could be $257 Billion annually in a few years.

So as you might guess, ISPs are closely watching email.

While ISPs don’t monitor the actual content of emails, they have a lot of other ways to determine if an email and/or email sender is legit.

First, there’s hidden code in every email that contains all of the information about message that is used to direct the mail through the internet to it’s intended recipient. That code tells ISPs a lot about the sender. 

For example:

•  The senders IP address can be tied to their domain (good) – or not (bad).

•  They can include an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record in their Domains DNS that identifies which IP addresses are able to send on behalf of the domain.

• Senders can use DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) signatures that insure that the content of an email isn’t altered in transit.

•  Senders can (and should, as it’s required for Gmail) have a

  published DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication & Conformance) record to tell ISPs what to do with emails that fail the other policies above.

These are basic protocols that should be employed by every email provider for every email and email client to insure maximum deliverability. If any or all of the above measures aren’t in place for your emails I can confidently assure you that your communications are ending up either in junk mail boxes or never delivered at all.

Your execution of the measures above are what let ISPs know that you’re a legitimate emailer and not a spammer. For spam tactics to work, they often have to imitate domains, or actually take control of them on some level by passing messages THROUGH your domain without your knowledge. The items listed above prove to ISPs that not only is your message from who it says it is from, your domain hasn’t been compromised.

This is the foundation of a good reputation with the ISPs. If you’re not employing all of these measures, your emails will immediately be suspect – and run the risk of ruining your domains reputation. 

Everyone knows where the “bad part of town” is in their city. It’s the place you don’t go because it’s risky, and probably dangerous. Well, it’s unavoidable that the information super-highway runs through a few of those

 neighborhoods as well. 

The address where your domain lives is called your IP address. And IP addresses are arranged in blocks – just like houses. IP blocks are arranged in sequence, just like house numbers on a street. If your IP address is on a street in a bad neighborhood (like you share an IP address with known spammers – or an IP address CLOSE to one of known spammers) it can be a big mark against your reputation. You have to live in a nice, older neighborhood that is well established to have a good reputation.

Spam reports, and emails delivered to ISP spam traps (we’ll talk about those some other time) also play into your email reputation and can cause you problems if you don’t maintain a quality email list.

The cumulative effect of having a bad email reputation is that your emails get caught up in spam filters and get dumped straight to junk mail, or worse, don’t get delivered at all. 20% of all emails don’t get delivered because they’ve crossed the threshold with ISPs by having neglected enough best practices that they have a high likelihood of being spam and the ISPs just kill them. They don’t get reported back, or make it to junk mail, because the ISPs don’t want spammers to know why they got rejected because they don’t want them to try and game the system further.

Long story short, there’s a whole world of email online reputation management that goes on. The scary part is that you don’t get to see a star rating, you just find out that your mail is going to junk folders or not being delivered at all. Maybe.

Recently, I worked with a client who had an email provider that handled many of the appropriate measures for proper email reputation management – but not all. He was struggling to get mail delivered to Gmail addresses. In examining his setup, it was clear pretty quickly what the problem was, and we are helping to correct that. 

It’s the job of your email provider to manage that reputation for you, and to keep you in the good graces of the ISPs of the world so that you have the highest level of deliverability possible. If you’re concerned about deliverability, give us a call and we can show you how it’s done. Even better, we can do it all for you when you bolt on one of our really cool websites.

Talk soon.

Brad