E-mail deliverability: things that go bump in the night

When you send e-mail, you expect it to get through. When someone sends you e-mail, you expect to receive it. Over the past few years, the explosive growth of spam — that unsolicited e-mail sent by the dregs of Internet society — has forced legitimate e-mail senders to pass through ever-more-challenging hoops to keep from being classified as spam.

In fact, seminars and books have been written on how to make sure your e-mail doesn’t trigger spam filters or otherwise get your e-mail on the wrong side of the Internet law.

But, historically, these issues were of concern for those who sent large batches of legitimate business e-mail, such as newsletters and the like. However, this has now changed.

In my previous post on e-mail deliverability, I wrote about clients of mine who are experiencing difficulties getting e-mail delivered. They are organizations who have never sent mass e-mail of any kind. The content of their e-mail gets 0 scores from Spam Assassin, is sent as one-to-one e-mail, and is sent from a relatively new domain name.

Yet, a relatively high percentage of their e-mail (sometimes as high as 50 percent) does not get to the recipient, instead either finding its way to the recipient’s junk folder or just disappearing into some Internet black hole along the way.

Why?

There are a number of elements that go into e-mail delivery these days, some of which explicitly and intentionally break standard protocols. Because illegitimate e-mail is so voluminous, e-mail determined to be spam often does not receive the proper e-mail server response messages. Instead, e-mail determined to be bulk mail is simply dropped without reply. This breaks SMTP and makes troubleshooting exceedingly difficult — and at times impossible.

Enough people report that this is a problem that it’s worth a more extensive exploration. In the next post, I’ll look at how some of the solutions are worse than the problem, and break other de facto standards of Internet behavior.