ispguides
Mimecast provides “cloud cybersecurity services for email, data and web,” specializing in cloud-based email management for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office 365, including security, archiving, and continuity services to protect business mail. To clients and users, Mimecast may seem like an integrated Microsoft add-on, but from a sender’s perspective, Mimecast is effectively its own mailbox provider. Typical Mimecast customers point their domains’ MX records at Mimecast infrastructure and any inbound mail is rejected or accepted by that infrastructure before being logged, processed, archived (if archiving is enabled), before being forwarded to the actual end user mailbox for the email message’s destination. Mimecast hosts inbound email services for many thousands of email domains. When cross-referenced against the top 10 million domains, Mimecast shows up in the MX record for over 37,000 of those domains. While this is smaller than Google (~800,000) and Microsoft (~727,000), a lot of the entities you’ll see
Google’s Gmail might be the preeminent mailbox provider. Launched in 2004, Gmail has grown from the “new kid on the block” into one of the biggest hosts of individual email mailboxes in the world. Depending on what data you look at, you might even see Gmail as the #1 mailbox provider, at least here in the US. Gmail’s spam filtering systems incorporate user feedback and engagement. And they know what they’re doing. If you are not sending wanted mail to people who requested that mail and who read that mail at high enough percentages, you’re going to struggle. You won’t reliably get your mail to the inbox. Their systems are too good — their magic spam fighting robots look at metrics very closely — and their view of certain metrics can even change over time! What got you to the inbox in 2019 might not be good enough to get
Successful inbox delivery to Microsoft consumer mailboxes (referred to as Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, or Microsoft “OLC”) can be tricky. Any deliverability consultant will tell you that Microsoft is often the quickest to block or junk your mail, and that it is relatively common to have deliverability issues at Microsoft only, and nowhere else. You are not alone.Not only can Microsoft often be “quicker on the trigger” when it comes to blocking, but also, resolution of deliverability issues can take longer here versus other mailbox providers. It’s not always clear what triggers spam folder placement or blocking — but like with so many other mailbox providers, the best thing you can do to minimize deliverability risk is to send truly wanted mail. No purchased lists, no email appends, no ten year old lists you found in the back of a filing cabinet. Sending engaging, wanted, recognized mail, is going to be your
Back in the day, these used to be called Postmaster Pages (or Postmaster Sites) and they are where email senders would go to look for help when having deliverability issues. Wondering what to do about mail bouncing at a mailbox provider or internet service provider? Need to submit a ticket to request that the mailbox provider reconsider mailbox placement? Those Postmaster Pages are where you’d find info and links.Do keep in mind that these contacts are not a “get out of jail free” card. Deliverability is generally reflective of sender practices and mailbox providers are loathe to grant free rein in the inbox to those who send unwanted mail. In other words, bad senders asking to get unblocked will often be told no, or will find themselves blocked again if they continue to send the same mail to the same lists that caused the initial blocking. If you’re getting blocked