ask al
Here’s an ever perplexing question (and one that results in a lot of traffic to my blog): Do Comcast email addresses end in .com or .net? Is it comcast.com or comcast.net? Am I aliversonchicago@comcast.com or aliversonchicago@comcast.net?Comcast has live email addresses at both comcast.com and comcast.net. The difference is, comcast.net email addresses are reserved for customers of Comcast/Xfinity, while comcast.com addresses are reserved for employees of Comcast.A while ago I posted a full breakdown of Comcast domains, but I thought it would be good to call this out more explicitly today — regular joe users signing up for your emails using the email address that comes free with their Comcast Xfinity cable service? That’s always going to be comcast.net.Some platforms will even block signups from emails at comcast.com, because most of those signups are typos — people who typed comcast.com when they should have typed comcast.net if they wanted to give
Hey, Al! My company has sent approximately 200,000 email messages in the past month to Yahoo! Mail recipients, but we haven’t received even a single complaint back via our ISP Feedback Loop. Is that normal?No, that is not normal! If you’re sending mail en masse, you’re going to get some non-zero number of complaints back. Even if it’s all fantastically opt-in and there’s no chance of somebody getting an unwanted email message, Yahoo’s ISP Feedback Loop, which they call the Complaint Feedback Loop, is always going to faithfully report along any complaints it is given, and that always will include a low number of complaints from people who truly did sign up for the email message. (Keeping in mind that a complaint isn’t what kills your deliverability dead; it’s a high number or high percentage of complaints that does it.)Thus, I suspect something is broken. Probably something on this checklist:You’re not
Evan writes, “Hi Al, My email address has just been compromised and now I am receiving hundreds of System Administrator and Mail delivery failure notices sent to my inbox from all those poor people who have received unwanted spam from my address. I noticed your name on the web when I went searching to find out how and if I can stop this happening and was hoping that you might have some ideas other than changing my email address?”Hey Evan, I’m sorry to hear you’re going through that. But don’t despair, this soon will pass. In the mean time, here’s what you should do.Change your email password, just to be safe. All throughout history, it’s been pretty unlikely that the bounces coming back from spam have anything to do with sending from your actual email account and email system. Do change that password, though, just in case. If a bad guy had…
Diego asks, “I want to find out from you if their is a script or software that one can use for warming up an IP. I will buy even if it’s not free.”Not only did Diego just write in with this question, but this topic came up when chatting with a potential client a few days ago. What can you do to shortcut or automate IP warming?The answer is: not much. IP warming, in its most basic definition, means building up your sending reputation through starting your dedicated IP address sending at low volume, and growing that send volume day-by-day for the first few weeks of sending. The gradual increase of volume from zero, plus sending wanted mail, is what dedicated IP senders need to do to build up long term inbox placement and deliverability success.A lot of different ESP platforms provide guidance on IP warming. At least one platform says…
Hey, Al! I was wondering if you could provide some guidance about SPF record format. Is it better to list the exact IP(s) in the SPF record? How about using the SPF dash (-all), or tilde (~all)? Which way is more common and better for deliverability? SPF aka Sender Policy Framework is a form of email authentication. It’s basically just a DNS record that you configure for your domain, and that DNS record usually just contains a list of the IP addresses of your mail servers (or somebody else’s mail servers that are allowed to send mail on behalf of your domain). Wikipedia’s the place to start if you want to dive into what SPF is in great detail. If you’re reading on past this point, I’m going to assume that you know what an SPF record looks like.When you create an SPF record, the last bit of it ends in…
Ask Al: We’re a restaurant that just opened. We signed up for an email service provider (ESP) platform and we’re looking to buy email lists to get started. Where should we start?Hey! Thanks for reaching out, but I wanted to warn you that email list purchasing isn’t the way to go here. It’s problematic for multiple reasons (poor deliverability, angry recipients, poorly targeted traffic) and just about every email service provider prohibits use of purchased lists. Run away from vendors telling you that their lists contain people who did really opt-in to hear from you — they’re typically lying. Here is just one example of why you should avoid this.An organically grown email list for a restaurant or entertainment venue is a valuable asset and people don’t usually give away that asset to others, not even for a modest fee. Meaning if somebody is offering to sell you a list,…
Help! I’m getting mail from MAILER-DAEMON@(various domains) with subject lines like: Delivery Status Notification (Failure), failure notice, Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender, Message Delivery Failure – Mail Delivery System, **Message you sent was blocked by our bulk email filter**, Recapito fallito, Returned mail: see transcript for details, Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender. These all seem to be bounces back from mail I didn’t send. What is happening and how do I make it stop?