Prior to Mother's Day, SpaBoom sent out one of our holiday-timed marketing campaigns to your opted-in clients. This campaign generated more than the usual rate of email "bounce-backs" - email that had trouble getting to its recipient.

The problems are usually easy to identify and fix, but knowing just what they are is the first step. Here are some very common situations that can occur on the way from the mail server to your client's email inbox, and what you can do about them.

• Bad Email Addresses: Simply, the address was mistyped by the client, by you, or was already incorrect when it was imported into SpaBoom from your external contacts list. There are three types, one of which can be spotted easily.
1. "Obvious" misspellings in the address. Usually affecting well-known major company addresses. Here is one that we have recently encountered: recipient@hoymail.com (notice that 'hotmail' is misspelled into 'hoymail')
2. "Non-obvious" misspellings. For example, if the address is actually my.recipient@gmail.com but the address listed for the client and sent to was myrecipient@gmail.com (the period is missing).
3. Dead-end email inboxes. These occur when the email address is - or was - a real address but their mailbox is full, or it was removed or no longer active.
• Over-aggressive spam filtering: The recipient of the email is using a mail system that is extremely strict about whom it receives mail from, and if you are not on their "allowed" list, the message could either be blocked or moved into the junk email folder. There are a few ways to try to combat this problem:
1. Have your recipient add you to their allowed senders list. They may already know how to do this, or they can ask their email administrator.
2. Ask your recipient to send an email to you. Use the email address listed on your account in the "Basics" tab in SpaBoom, as this is the from address used. Many mail programs will automatically allow email FROM you once your client has sent mail TO you.
3. If your messages are getting delivered to a Bulk or Junk folder, have your recipient mark your messages as "not spam". In large email accounts like Hotmail or Yahoo, when a message is captured by the bulk or spam folders, your client can select it and mark it as "not spam", and you as a sender will then be saved as an OK address for the future.
• Busy Mail Servers: this will cause the "delivery has been delayed" messages. You do not need to do anything for these messages. Almost all of the time, you will see one of these messages and then nothing further. This means the message was delayed once and then re-tried and successfully delivered. Usually the delay is 4 hours, and it can be triggered by higher than normal traffic on the sending or receiving mail servers.

You probably already know how to use SpaBoom's Email Marketing to entice and excite your existing clients. However, making sure that your clients receive the emails that you worked so hard to create is key to your marketing success.

We hope that none of the reasons listed above have affected the ability of your clients to receive email, but if they have and you've worked through the troubleshooting steps your future problems should diminish noticeably. SpaBoom wants to make sure that information about your specials is able to get to its destination, and your business can thrive!

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One Response to “Email boomerang”

1. Scoey Says:
   May 19th, 2007 at 6:18 am

   We are getting a significant amount of bounce backs. So many that I don't have time to correct them all before the next mailing. Does anyone have any suggestions on how they manage their email lists? Seems like it would be really conveienent if there were some additional functionality to assist in managing the email list. Could be that I just need to set aside a day and commit to working through all the bouncebacks. Thanks…

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