March 25, 2009

Avoiding A SPAM Complaint Meltdown

By Bill Pease

The current state of email deliverability is one of increasing complexity. Successfully delivering messages to supporters’ inboxes is no longer a simple matter of just pressing the “send” key. There are numerous factors that can trigger email delivery barriers and significantly diminish your organization’s efforts to effectively communicate with constituents.

If you intend to properly address this challenge, one of the best places to begin is understanding how many spam complaints are being filed against your organization, and then determining how to modify your list building or messaging practices in order to reduce these complaints.

Most major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use spam complaint rates to determine whether to accept email from organizations, and whether to deliver that email to an inbox or spam folder. Each ISP enables users to report messages as spam. If enough recipients report a message as spam, automated blocking and filtering systems kick in. This is not a good scenario, to say the least, since supporters cannot help if your appeals do not reach their inboxes.

So how does your organization get visibility into spam complaint rates? ISPs offer “feedback loops” that send complaints back to the originating mail system, so it’s critical that your organization work with an email service provider that inter-operates with these feedback loops. If you don’t, you will not know how your organization appears to a recipient ISP (as a spammer or a trustworthy sender). You also won’t be able to remove complainants from your email list and reduce future delivery barriers.

Avoiding Collateral Damage

If your organization uses an email service provider, it’s likely that your email is sent from a system shared by multiple clients. On a shared system, there’s a high probability that spam complaints generated by problematic mailers will negatively impact delivery results for everyone. That’s why it’s critical to choose an email service provider that can insulate your organization from the collateral damage caused by mailers that don’t follow permission-based list building or good online marketing practices.

Reputation-based mail pools can help. This technique allows an email service provider to segment clients into different mail streams based on spam complaint data. Nonprofits that receive few or no complaints get grouped into a “good” mailer pool, while senders that receive a large amount of complaints are grouped together and served using different mail resources. This way, organizations with better email reputations operate in a more preferable mail pool and can be expected to obtain nearly 100 percent inbox delivery.

Reducing Spikes in Spam Complaints

Even if your organization follows best practices, you may occasionally do something that triggers a spike in spam complaints. This is most commonly caused by gaps in permission-based list building practices or unwelcome changes in message frequency or content. A good email service provider will offer you tools for mitigating the impact of mistakes like this on your overall email delivery.

For example, emails that have been organically acquired following strict permission-based practices are much less likely to generate spam complaints than addresses that have been added via append services. If your email service provider can segment your mail stream by the permission basis of intended recipients, any spikes in spam complaints from lower quality lists can be insulated from the mail resources used to send to your core house file.

The Fall of Whitelisting and the Rise of Email Reputation

Some major ISPs use whitelists to help identify trustworthy email senders. But these relationship-based systems are relatively expensive to maintain, and only a few of the top 30 ISPs operate them. Even where they are used, such as at providers like AOL and Yahoo, whitelists no longer mean as much as they used to and do not guarantee inbox delivery.

While ISPs today do consider white-listing in their delivery decision-making process, they pay more attention to the actual metrics collected on inbound email. If they detect a spike in complaint rates, or a high percentage of invalid email addresses, they will raise delivery barriers dynamically -- even if you’re whitelisted.

What matters more than being whitelisted is whether your email service provider has a strong email reputation. There are a number of third-party providers of reputation data, such as Return Path, Trusted Source, Senderbase and Karmasphere. These groups compile sender-specific mail reputation scores using complaint data and other information provided by a wide variety of recipient systems.

Major ISPs and other recipient domains look up a sender’s IP address in real time as messages arrive. If your reputation score is good, you will get good delivery; if your reputation is poor, a variety of delivery barriers will be raised.

A good email service provider will have integrated email reputation metrics into its mail infrastructure and delivery assurance program. They also should be willing to point you to third-party reputation services that validate their assertions about email reputation.

Monitoring

If your organization relies solely on bounce reports to measure email delivery performance, you essentially are operating in the dark. Bounce reports are unreliable for a variety of reasons and don’t capture critical aspects of an email’s fate. For example, no bounce report is sent when an ISP diverts your message to a spam folder, although that will have almost as much of a negative impact on your response rates as if the ISP had rejected the email entirely.

Reputable email service providers have integrated inbox delivery monitoring systems that generate reports on the proportion of email that got delivered to the inbox, routed to the bulk mail folder, or rejected entirely. In addition, the best vendors will proactively monitor your organization’s overall email reputation as well as third-party blacklists used to control delivery into some domains.

They should understand which clients are creating problems, then take corrective action to ensure delivery barriers are minimized across the broader system. The more specific monitoring capabilities and processes that are in place, the better off your organization will be in avoiding unexpected delivery obstacles.

In summary, while email remains a critical communication channel for nonprofits, your organization will not enjoy its benefits unless your messages are getting through to supporters’ inboxes. Email deliverability is a shared responsibility. As an organization, you need to follow permission-based list building practices and ensure that you’re sending timely and relevant messages to supporters. At the same time, your email service provider needs to have an infrastructure and email application that monitors and responds to spam complaints and helps to maintain your organization’s external email reputation.

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Bill Pease is chief scientist at Convio in Austin, Texas. His email is bpease@convio.com

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

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