Management: Email Abuse Help

Managing Email, Email Abuse and Mailing Lists
Most email programs have an Inbox. This is true for Thunderbird, Mozilla, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Entourage, Eudora, Outlook and Pegasus, to name but a few email programs. Unless your email program is configure to automatically delete or block spam, or you have email filters to filter certain emails, all incoming email will be placed in your Inbox.

We have found that our users will normally notify us immediately if they have either sent email and it has been returned, or they have been sent email and they can't find it in their mail programs. We diligently research each case and, where necessary, edit our spam filters.

It has been said that SPAM (unsolicited, unwanted email) is the bane of the Internet and probably uses more bandwidth then all other services. Consider this when you are thinking about bulk emailing programs and forwarding email to your friends that was forwarded to you. Think about all those annoying unsolicited faxes you received in the 1990s.

There are bulk email lists that known as opt-in lists. These are lists of email addresses that belong to people who have chosen to receive your emails. These recipients are unlikely to tag your email as junk and automatically dispatch it to the Trash, another handy email folder found in most email client programs.

If you do use an opt-in list to contact potential clients make sure you send pertinent material. That is, don't send information about beer to an email list for temperance women. You will probably find yourself being disallowed from using that list in the future. And don't email the list more frequently than permitted — or provided for as you will likely find your email ending up in the spam file.

Some Do's and Don'ts
Be up front about who you are and how you can be contacted. You are not going to win friends, or business, by trying to remain anonymous.

Make it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe from your list. If they want out, they aren't going to pay any attention to any more unsolicited email you may send. Cleaning your list will provide you with a better understanding of your success rate.

Once a person has unsubscribed don't re-subscribe them without first getting their permission.

If you are managing your own email server, make sure a spammer cannot forward their email through your server. If this happens you will probably receive a number of abuse complaints and your domain may be permanently blacklisted by us and other service providers.

To ensure efficient routing of your email, please:

  • Remove email addresses from your list that bounce (i.e there is no valid email address / recipient) quickly.
  • What is known as Reverse DNS is used by many mail servers and mail forwarders to validate the sending email address / server. If you do not have valid reverse DNS properly established your email could end up being dumped, not reaching your desired destination and not being bounced (it won't be bounced because the reverse DNS lookup did not work and the sender could not be authenticated).
  • When you do get bounced email or other email errors try to determine what the error was. SMTP servers (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) will normally provide your with response codes in the 500 - 600 range which will provide the information you need. Often this is simply because you attempted to send to too man recipients. Other times it might be something more serious that takes a little research. In either case, don't simply resend because you will likely encounter the same errors.