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October 18, 2007

Scoring Your Email So That It Gets Delivered

Spam is surely becoming like death and taxes - inevitable. The key is how to make sure your messages to donors and advocates don't end up in the intended recipient's junk mail folder or worse - accidentally get reported as spam.

Software programs have come along that allow users to scan incoming email for spam and indicate the level at which a message qualifies as such. These scoring systems then deliver the email as usual to the Inbox, allowing users to decide for themselves how to deal with the message.

Before your donors accept a spam scoring system, Bill Pease, chief scientist at Convio in Austin, Texas suggests your supporters consider the following:

1. Unless your organization's email content regularly involves commercial-sounding language, content-only spam scoring systems are of relatively limited utility.
2. Your mail "reputation" is the driving component governing your deliverability. Reputation is tracked primarily for the IP address(es) sending your email, not your domain name. Reputation includes whether your mail infrastructure is complaint with various email standards and whether your IPs are:
   A) Sending to large numbers of invalid addresses at a domain;
   B) On various blocklists;
   C) On commercial whitelists (e.g., Habeas Safelist or SenderScore Certified) or internal whitelists (e.g., AOL Basic and Enhanced Whitelists); and,
   D) Generating large numbers of spam report complaints from recipients. You can check aspects of your mail reputation for free at trustedsource.org, senderscore.org, and senderbase.org.
3. If you want to use a spam scoring system to asses whether a mailing is going to encounter delivery barriers, you need to use the fee-based services offered by vendors like Habeas, Return Path or Pivotal Veracity (PV).
4. Even the best pre-test tool cannot predict your real-world delivery results. The reason for that is so many delivery decisions are now made dynamically at recipient systems in response to real-time data on your mailer IP behavior and complaint rates. So you should complement any pre-testing with Inbox delivery monitoring. This is also available as a free service from vendors like Habeas, Return Path or PV.

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This article is from NPT Instant Fundraising, a publication of The NonProfit Times.

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