Did you know that the number of “bounces” you generate is monitored? A bounce is when you send and email out to someone but it comes back to you as undeliverable. Maybe that person’s email box is full or more likely you have the wrong email address for the recipient. Either way it is a bounce, and it is counted. If the amount of mail you send generates a large percentage of bounces, some anti-spam services will mark you as a spammer. This is because many spammers use a shotgun approach to sending email. Simply put, they try tons of common names at a known good domain just in hopes that some will get through. So, if they know that the domain name “xyz.com” is good, then they will send mail to “ann@xyz.com” and “annie@xyz.com” and “amy@xyz.com” and so on all the way to “zed@xyz.com”.
Yes, they will send hundreds if not thousands of email and maybe 1% or less will get through. But, they will gain two things. They will have gotten that 1% through, and because of the bounce backs or lack there of, they will know which ones are good. Now they can throw out the 99% that are bad, keep the 1% that are good, and either continue marketing to that 1% and/or sell that 1% to other email marketing firms. And so, the glut of spam continues.
Anyway, because of that, if email or anti-spam services notice a large percent of your email is bounced back, they may assume that you are a spam house farming email addresses. This is called being black-listed. And trust me, once you are on those black-lists, it can be very hard to get yourself off of them.
I will talk more about how to manage all of this in the future, but in the meantime make sure you are doing your best to keep the bad emails addresses out of your address book. That means three things:
- When you do get a bounce back, correct it immediately. Delete the entry or find out the correct address. Either way, make sure you don’t keep sending to it.
- When some requests that you stop sending them email, do it. If they have to put you in their blocked senders list to keep from getting your emails, you are going to get bounce backs and also get marked as a spammer.
- Finally, if you have large lists that you suspect may have some bad addresses, use a program such as eMail Verifier from MaxProg or some other such program or service. For various reasons these will only catch about 85% of the bad addresses, but that is still a vast improvement.
Ok, that is it for now. I will be talking more about bounces, cleaning email lists, and these types of services in the future. In the meantime, if you have any questions please ask away!
