Fundraising Email Faces Being Blocked/Throttled

By Tim Mills-Groninger
Nonprofits that rely on email campaigns need to think long and hard about their programs and the process by which those emails are sent or risk Microsoft/Hot Mail and other service inbox providers "throttling" messages and depressing response and income.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. That great motto from the much-maligned United States Postal Service has little credence in the world of email. For a price, the post office will guarantee a near perfect delivery rate. You might not know if the item was opened by any other metric than response rate, but there's a good chance that it got there or you got the piece back.

The rules and measures have changed when it comes to email. Your email software or bulk email service has to send messages from an IP address to the recipient's inbox provider, who in turn places it in the appropriate mailbox. Nonprofits, hoping for longer-term relationships can use electronic measures of delivery rates, open rates, click throughs and others to gain insights into how effective an electronic campaign is and the overall stability of a particular constituency.

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Unfortunately, the economies of scale of email make it too easy to send messages to large numbers of email addresses: spam. Like the pork product namesake, spam email is an acquired taste and the ultimate definition lies with the recipient. Some people might like the opportunity to purchase certain enhancing pharmaceuticals or benefit from millions of dollars locked in Nigerian bank accounts. But most folks tend to agree that such messages are legitimate spam and welcome the efforts of filters provided by their inbox provider to separate good email from junk email. Spammers likewise want to get their messages out and have engaged in an ever-escalating war with ISPs and software makers to defeat spam filters and sneak their messages into innocent mail boxes.

The opportunity to use email for public information, advocacy, and fundraising is irresistible for the nonprofit community. Sadly, all too often it also looks like spam. Large numbers of emails going out in a short period of time look suspicious. One method to reduce suspicion is to trust known email sources - particularly the IP address of the message sender. That's good news for nonprofits with established email campaigns - until they switch bulk email providers. A new email provider will send your email from a new IP address, and that can impact deliverability of your messages.

Microsoft recently confirmed that it is limiting the number of messages that it will allow into its Hotmail service from new IP addresses. Yahoo mail is also rumored to be restricting messages in a similar way. Sometimes referred to as IP throttling, Hotmail and other inbox providers limit the number of messages that they will deliver to subscriber mailboxes in a specific time period.

Whether it's 500 messages a day or 1,000 per hour is largely unknown because the inbox services want to keep the spammers guessing. Throttling high volumes of email originating from IP addresses that haven't been used previously is one way to reduce spam. Once an originating IP address has sent enough mail that doesn't show other spam patterns it can gain a level of trust and the inbox service will allow larger volumes to be delivered in a given time span. Throttled email is not delivered and can be considered deleted.

This candor from Microsoft is unusual in the cat and mouse game of spam attacks and suppression. Yahoo and Hotmail collectively account for almost 200 million email addresses. Throttling of messages of means that nonprofit email campaigns will be less effective because fewer messages are getting through. Changing email service providers almost always changes statistics because every vendor uses different methods to measure delivery rates.

IP addresses identify every device on the Internet, although many computers and other devices can be hidden on a private network behind a few IP addresses. Email services will use a range of IP addresses to manage the volume of messages being sent on behalf of customers. ISPs can issue a rotating series of IP addresses to a single computer to limit the capabilities of a personal account. Inbox service provides look for ranges of IP numbers that they can consider trusted, bad, or suspect, and these lists are constantly being adjusted.

The lesson for nonprofits contemplating a change in email service providers is that it is going to change delivery rates and statistics. Declines in delivery ratio might be due to how rates are calculated, but they might also be due to changes in how mail is handled by the inbox providers because they do not recognize the new IP address of the message source.

One way to manage the transition to a new provider is to behave in a way that builds trust -- a major campaign to every constituent is probably not a good idea, but too low of a volume can also be a warning sign to Hotmail and similar providers. Work with your vendor to insure that volumes are within "legitimate" ranges until your new IP address (or possibly range of addresses) becomes trusted. Inbox providers, such as Hotmail and Yahoo, are constantly revising throttling and filtering techniques. Email service providers have to adapt to make sure that the email gets through.

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Tim Mills-Grominger is the associate executive director of Lumity, formerly the IT Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits with technology issues. His email is timmg@itresourcecenter.org

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