Deliverability: A Collaborative Effort

With new advanced spam filtration technology, getting email delivered to the inbox is the biggest challenge with email communications. And contrary to a lot of sales talk, no email service provider (ESP) can guarantee deliverability. There is no magic formula or service that can guarantee to deliver your email directly to the inbox. However, following technology and list management best practices coupled with monitoring and relationship building can substantially increase your probability of avoiding that dreaded junk folder.

CapitalSpeak has a dedicated delivery staff to help its clients follow technology best practices, manage black list and ISP relationships and contribute to the ISP and spam fighting community. CapitalSpeak expects its clients to do their part by adhering to acceptable ISP list gathering practices, basic message design guidelines and list cleansing processes.

The Three Components of Deliverability:

Reputation: Many consumer-based ISPs determine deliverability based on the sender’s reputation. It is important to understand that email reputation works similar to the financial credit system. If you have a good sending reputation, your chances of good deliverability increase just as your probability of getting a good deal on a loan increase with good credit history. You might be thinking How does an ISP identify me as a sender? An ISP uses an IP address to uniquely identify machines on the Internet. This is similar to how a social security number identifies an individual. Just as an IP address acts as a social security number, a domain name functions as your face, displaying to the world your unique characteristics. Pairing your domain name to a unique IP address provides a complete sender identity allowing for transparency with your recipients and ISPs. Based on this, ISPs have developed or outsourced reputation scoring systems, similar to a credit reporting agency, to determine the sending reputations of IP address and domains. The scoring system, based on a host of information such as authentication, volume of email sent, internal complaints, black lists, etc., assigns your unique IP address and domain a score that will ultimately decide if your email goes to the recipient’s inbox or into a black hole.

Content: Although most ISPs use reputation filtering processes, corporate networks and consumer security software use content filtering as their main weapon for fighting spam. Gold Lasso provides basic and advanced content analysis tools to help client increase their probability of bypassing content filters. Clients need to be flexible with their message design and copy to be successful with content filtering deliverability.

Authentication: Authentication uses a set of protocols to verify that an e-mail message has been sent by the domain name in the from line since spammers falsify the from line to conceal their identity. These protocols include Spenders Policy Framework (SPF), SenderID, DKIM and DomainKeys. They all rely on DNS records, either to obtain sending mail server addresses or public keys for decrypting a digital signature. Both ISPs and corporate networks use authentication to filter spam. Gold Lasso configures all client domains with these authentication protocols.

Gold Lasso offers all the technical tools and best practices to help its clients with each stage of deliverability, however a collaborative effort is always needed in order to achieve optimal results.

Gold Lasso Delivery Monitoring Tools:
Client assigned unique IP address
Custom DNS
Authentication: SPF/DomainKeys/SenderID/DKIM
White list submission
Real time black list monitoring
Basic/Advanced content analysis
HTML validation
Delivery monitoring and analysis - bulk/inbox
Hardware and software based throttling
Complaint reports and ISP feedback loops
Automated list cleansing (bounces/complaints/formats)
Dedicated delivery monitoring staff
...and much more!