[PLUG] Understanding where e-mails can get lost

[Michael Barnes]

I have often seen this with "home-brew" mass mailings, especially from
Windows systems. I have had very good results with MailChimp for this kind
of thing. They have all kinds of tools and features. For smaller
quantities, the service is free. I especially like the user management.
People can subscribe and unsubscribe themselves with just a few mouse
clicks. I have never had an issue with newsletters not going through, going
to spam, or  getting blacklisted.

Michael


On Jun 14, 2017 11:04, "wes" <plug at the-wes.com> wrote:

> >
> >
> >    Is there anything I can run from here to try to find why these
> > newsletters
> > never arrive while other messages have no problems?
> >
> > Rich
> >
>
> newsletters and other automated mailings are often sent through a third
> party provider, which introduces the complexity of validating that provider
> as an authorized party to send emails on behalf of that domain. normally a
> domain is configured to announce only its own mail server as valid for
> sending emails. extra steps are needed to give a mail sending service the
> same level of authorization.
>
> additionally, these services are often miscategorized as sources of spam,
> since many people misuse the reporting function in their email service to
> report legit automated emails as spam. which means, their mass-mail
> provider might be blacklisted at your end, which may or may not show up in
> your logs, depending on how it's set up. even if it does show up, it may
> not have the sender's name in it anywhere, so a grep for it wouldn't yield
> results. it may show up as "attempted connection from 1.2.3.4, denied due
> to blacklist" or similar. of course, if you don't know where it's
> connecting from, you don't know what to look for. it may also not show up
> at all, either due to configuration, or perhaps because the block occurs
> upstream from your location. as in, your ISP could be blocking traffic from
> that IP address. not terribly likely, but I've seen it before. I once had
> to argue with network engineers at amazon, years ago when that was actually
> a real thing that happened (ever), because they were blocking traffic from
> my network while insisting that they weren't.
>
> if they're truly getting bounces from your address, ask them to forward you
> a copy of the bounce message. this should be easy enough, even for a
> non-technically-inclined person. more likely, if they're using a mass-mail
> service, they get a dashboard report of their mailing, along with stats for
> things like successful and failed deliveries, which may be reported as
> "bounce rate" or similar. it'll be up to the service to either provide (or
> not provide) any features for seeing why a given email failed.
>
> are you friends with anyone who does get the newsletter successfully? ask
> them to forward you a copy of it (preferably with headers included), so you
> can examine the differences between that one and an email that reaches you.
> or, you can use an account at a different mail service (gmail or whatever)
> to sign up for the newsletter, then see if you get it there. if you do, you
> can then compare the headers of that one to those of an individual email
> you receive successfully on your primary account.
>
> -wes
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