How do you ensure your messages make it into your recipients’ INBOXes?

Deliverability is key to anyone sending newsletters, announcements, notifications, or any other type of bulk email.  As a provider of premium and bulk email services, we constantly advise customers on how they can legitimately avoid having messages marked as spam and ensure that they are not black listed. In this article, we consolidate our advice for everyone’s benefit.  This includes: ensuring you have a good mailing list, maintaining your mailing list, email message content, and reputation management techniques like SPF, DKIM, and IP anonymization.

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Many major Internet Service Providers (e.g. AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Comcast, etc.) have FBLs “feedback loops” for reporting SPAM complaints by their users.  I.e. if a user “marks a message as Spam”, information about that message and the fact that it was considered “Spam” by the recipient can be sent back to the originating email server, for example LuxSci.

LuxSci has participated in feedback loops for a long time .  Now we have greatly extended our participation by:

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Many web site forms and comment forms are plagued by “web form spam”.   Automated programs crawl the Internet looking for web forms.  When found, they start submitting spam advertisements through the forms in the hopes that some of the recipients of these form submissions will see the ads and act on them.  Almost nobody does … but the spam still comes and gets worse and worse over time.

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We have discussed how email messages should not be expected to arrive instantly.  This naturally brings to mind “text messages” (aka SMS messages) that people send to their cell phones.  These are commonly expected to be delivered “instantly” — but that is also not always the case.  While text messages are generally very fast, and usually more quickly delivered than email messages, they are not always “instant”.

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It is an extremely common and annoying practice of spammers to send you email that is from yourself or your colleagues or friends.  I.e. “forged email”.  We discuss this problem in the article: Save Yourself From “Yourself”: Stop Spam From Your Own Address.

Users of LuxSci’s Premium Email Filtering service now have a new and very powerful weapon to stop this kind of spam — “SPF-enabled allow list entries”.

This feature allows you to easily receive protection from forged spam messages while at the same time ensuring that legitimate messages sent between users in your organization are not filtered or caught as spam.

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Web Bugs are images in HTML-formatted email messages that, when viewed, tell the sender of the message that you read the message.  This mechanism of obtaining an essentially covert confirmation that (a) your email address is valid, (b) the email got past your filters, and (c) you actually read the message, is pervasively used by Spammers to identify what addresses are reading their messages.

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LuxSci has updated the optional Quarantine Reports that are sent to users of its Basic Spam and Virus Filtering service.  These reports, once enabled, send users a daily email listing any new Spam and/or Virus messages caught by the filters and saved in separate Spam and Virus folders.

In addition to an improved look and feel, several new features are now available in these reports.

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You thought email was a simple concept, but you are at once confronted with a plethora of acronyms and jargon like POP, IMAP, WebMail, Aliases, Forwards, SMTP, IMAP, POP, Quota, SPAM, TLS, SSL, Archival, and more! This article describes the ins and outs of email, explains these terms, and helps you figure out what services and features you need from your personal or business email service provider.

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Email security issues and technologies are extremely complicated; however, here we intend to make the salient issues and solutions clearly understandable to all readers.

You may already know that email is not a perfectly secure communication medium; however, it might surprise you to learn just how inherently insecure email can be. Messages thought deleted can still exist in backup folders on remote servers years after being sent. Hackers can read and modify messages in transit, use your usernames and passwords to login to your online services, and steal your identity and critical information!

As the amount of crucial business conducted via email increases, so does the amount of Spam, viruses, hacking, fraud, and other malicious activity. Unless precautions are taken, email can leave you and your business open to escalating security and privacy risks. What are these risks?

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LuxSci is serious about the quick and efficient delivery of all email sent by our clients. We take extra steps to ensure that our servers sending outbound email are not blacklisted.  Indeed, while it is impossible to never get on any blacklist (unless you are not sending email), we have very rarely been blocked; in theses cases, we have quickly re-routed email around the blocks to ensure delivery until the block is removed.

(Note that this article applies to our premium email hosting services, and not to our separate High Volume outbound email services).

How do we stay off of the blacklists?

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