New Year's Resolutions

As the holiday season comes to an end and the beginning of a new decade dawns upon us, thoughts turn to that age old tradition - the New Year's Resolution. Here at Cloudmark, we'll resolve to identify more spam in 2010. Nothing too ground-breaking there but it is what we do best. If you're struggling to think of some resolutions for 2010, we've come up with a list of some possible suggestions, to suit senders of all shapes and sizes.

Authenticate

If you aren't signing your mails with DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) yet, make 2010 the year that you start! Whilst DKIM alone won't help improve your deliverability, if you have other good sending practices, you should be able to take advantage of your good reputation. If you aren't too sure about what the various flags mean, J.D. Falk recently posted a quick guide which should get you up to speed. Additionally, if you publish SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records for a sending domain or hostname, consider being more specific about where your mail might be sent from. Stating that mail will come from a handful of servers makes the record much more useful to receivers than blanket coverage of every IP address that your email or Internet service provider has.

De-clutter the Inbox

Even when recipients are receiving newsletters that they want, sometimes the volumes they receive can overwhelm and lead to unsubscribes, or worse, the spam button. If you're sending more than one newsletter to a recipient per week, consider if that really is the best policy; you should definitely be giving them the option to define how often they receive your mails in this case.

Go truly Opt-In

Are you still making new subscribers un-tick the checkbox on your signup forms? You really, really shouldn't be. If your signup form has the checkbox pre-ticked and you make them un-tick it in order not to receive your newsletter, this makes your list an opt-out one, not an opt-in one. This is not best practice. Christine Borgia has a good example of this topic and goes on further to talk about engagement on the AOL postmaster blog. While we're at it, make sure that the accompanying text that explains what happens if the checkbox is ticked or not is written in simple and plain language. You don't want to not confuse them into not signing up for your list, after all.

Reply and Exist

Please do not reply using this e-mail address. If you have any problems or questions regarding this survey, you can click here

Please do not reply directly to this email as no-one will respond. If you wish to contact [sender], please do so via the 'contact us' section of our website

We've all seen mails containing sentences such as these. The intent behind them has some validity; you don't want your mailboxes to fill up with lots of queries and it is more efficient to channel recipients through your already established processes. Just think about this for a moment though, if you don't want to get mails from your recipients, why are they going to want to get mails from you? Beware the perils of getting this really wrong!

Promote the Unsubscribe Link

Unsubscribes are not what you want but they are a lot better than getting the spam button treatment. If the recipient doesn't want your mail anymore they probably won't want to scroll all the way to the bottom of your mail. Make it easier for them to unsubscribe from your list than to hit that spam button, which could have knock on effects for your reputation. It isn't a particularly new concept either.

Be Transparent

If you use shortened domains, either for the reverse DNS of your IP allocations or for links within your content, make it easier to spot and more obvious that those are yours. Consider directing HTTP requests to those domains to your own website, perhaps a specific set of pages that outlines exactly what these domains are used for. Whilst we're on a transparency trip, step out from behind that domain whois proxy service. If you are a legitimate business then there is no reason to be hiding your details behind one of these services, intended more for private individuals. Laura at Word to the Wise has commented on this same topic as part of her Thats What Spammers Do series. Hopefully there is at least one resolution for you in there to stick by. Above all, just resolve not to engage in practices that make it hard to distinguish you from a spammer; oh, and try not to break it before the end of January, OK? Happy New Year!