Checking Email Delivery

Making Sure It's Getting There

[CromeYellow]

Hey!

With the anti-spam wars getting nastier by the minute, I was wondering how people around here check that their legitimate opt-in email is getting to its destination?

We are currently moving our lists as the email marketing service we were using has had some of its IPs blacklisted.

The guy at the new service has been personally recommended, but even he said sometimes the big free email providers seem to stop his email, although not always.

What do you guys do about this, if anything?

Cy

[threecrans]

You could use DSN (delivery status notification).

[CromeYellow]

Hi threecrans

I don't know what DSN is. Can you explain?

By the way, all my email stuff is done in plain text, so I can't do the HTML open rate thing, if it's anything to do with that.

Cy

[nipear]

Depending on how critical email is to you. I'd say set up test accounts at hotmail, msn, aol, yahoo, earthlink along with mail clients like outlook that have spam filters built in. This is what we do. So if your email goes to these accounts I'd say your pretty safe...

[hannamyluv]

We have test accounts, too. We test them to those ahead of time. But even then, you are not guaranteed.

You should still resend bounced email addresses every couple of months with a spotless clean test email, just to make sure that they are really bounced or just your email being denied at some point.

Beyond that, it is always a good idea to have a few seed accounts just so you know when your email goes out that your provider has sent it out properly.

[graywolf]

If you are sending HTML email include a 1x1 pixel gif with a querystring and an id value that matches up to the users ID (I think they call this a webbug) then when the image is called flag a field in a database. If the person doesn't have preview turned on you won't know but most users do.

[CromeYellow]

Thanks folks, looks like test accounts is the way to go.

Cheers :)

Cy

[threecrans]

DSN is a SMTP extention which enables notification of success/failure.

[email.about.com...]

Unfortunately, (1) this is not supported by all mail servers and (2) if the mail server accepts the mail and it is caught by a filter after this, you wouldn't get a notification.

[jpjones]

Another (more complicated and not without stumbling points) suggestion -
If it's a HTML email, you could embed a 1x1 image in there requesting a graphic from a webserver.

You could then look at the server logs (or be more technical and get the image to call a script, logging the results into a database for viewing via a browser), and find out when the email was actually read, from what IP address etc.

What are the stumbling points I mentioned? Well :
1) The receiver might not be able to read HTML
2) The receiver might not be online when reading the email, and so the graphic cannot be called, so the hit won't be registered.
3) The receivers' server might strip out (or even reject) all HTML.

JP