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Level 1: What To Do If You Are Filtered
What will you do when you discover that ISPs and mail services are blocking your one-to-one, mission-critical communications
(ex., post-order e-mail, support replies, e-mails asking subscribers to confirm their opt-in, affiliate registrations)?
Your immediate reaction will be to get angry.
But this is business, nothing personal. When this happens to you, understand that ISPs have to filter tens of millions of e-mail daily, or their clients would be swamped in spam. Mistakes ("false-positives") happen. So...
Don't get mad. And don't get "even" (as that old saying goes).
As small businesses, we have to accept a certain, reasonable "false-positive"
level. It is simply impossible to make a perfect filter. If you make it
too sensitive, you trash lots of good e-mail. And if you make it too loose,
then too much spam hits the end-user.
So accept the reality that it will occur. When it does, the problems may
cause chaos (if it involves a major filter) or it may be almost undetectable (if you
get onto the "blacklist" of one of the fringe vigilantes who are being taken less and less seriously by business).
Either way, the Deliver My Mail program is a sequential-level approach
to setting things right. It inoculates you against
unjustified filtering and reduces the bother by 99%. Here are the two action steps to execute when you discover some of your outbound e-mail is being eliminated by filters, your
Level 1 Response...
- a) Educate and Activate
- b) Repair the Problem
Level 1a) Educate and Activate
An informed customer becomes a powerful ally. And that is the way it should be. Because you are not the problem -- you're just caught in the tuna net.
But look at it from your customer's ("uneducated") point of view...
"Hey, I didn't get my mail. What a lousy company that was."
Educate the customer and send him/her back to the
ultimate break in the chain... the ISP or mail service. At this point,
there is no blame (except of course the spammers themselves). If the
ISP or mail service is conscientious and whitelists, you all live
happily ever after!
If you sell a product or service, have affiliates, use autoresponders,
take subscriptions to an e-zine... if you do anything that requires you to send
e-mail to people, "education and activation" is critical. It has the
following goals...
- Educate Your Customer
Customer understands and holds you blameless, the way it really should be!
- Activate Your Customer
Customer whitelists. If that is not possible, customer should rightly be upset about not getting WANTED e-mail.
- "Propaganda-proof!"
It's shameless how some ISPs will distort, even lie, putting the blame on you (yes, the same ones who
do not whitelist!). But if you boil it down to the basics, they are the ones who refuse to deliver the mail. So if you have a customer with an ISP like this, your
education will clearly empower the customer to recognize who is "in the wrong" --
that customer will vote with his/her wallet and switch mail accounts.
- Maintain Your credibility.
After all, your customer is wondering if you
are a spammer... "Hey, why else would my ISP filter them?" And the ISP or mail service is certainly happy to leave that impression, rather than admit they make mistakes. Your integrity and reputation are at stake.
- Reduce Customer Support Load.
All the common questions and worries are automatically handled on the confirmation Web pages, and on the whitelisting Web pages (details are provided in the download package).
- Maintain A Channel Of Communication.
Ultimately, whether your customer whitelists you or switches addresses, you end up with an open route to communicate.
Here is how to achieve those goals...
First, educate... clearly explain the basic process to your customer, and where it is breaking down...
- STEP 1) A customer wants AND expects a piece of mail, for whatever reason.
- STEP 2) A non-spamming small business sends that e-mail.
- STEP 3) The ISP filters it out.
- STEP 4) The customer doesn't get the mail s/he wants.
So far, although the process is breaking down at the ISP level, it's not really their fault.
"False-positives happen." Explain that to your customer. And then...
Second, activate... explain how to whitelist.
Educate and activate immediately after the transaction or registration, right on your confirmation page.
Remember... you may not be able to "get through the filter" to explain it by e-mail. The Deliver My Mail download package (including a well-worded, proven template to make it easy)
shows you how to educate and activate your customers at such common, important "points of contact" as...
- Post-Order
- Support
- Affiliate registration
- Post-subscription
- Forgot username and password
The download package explains and provides the templates you need to...
1) Educate Clearly and accurately explain the situation.
2) Activate Motivate your customer to the next logical steps... whitelisting
(and if that does not work, complaining and switching addresses).
Naturally, you'll do some customizing for your own particular business circumstances.
After you do it for the first point of contact (ex., inbound support), it's easy to
repeat the process for every important point that visitors make contact with you (ex., orders, subscriptions, forms).
You should implement this process even if you have no filtering problems. Why? Because you are
almost sure to get filtered by some little outfit sooner or later, and it serves as an insurance
policy that will reduce pain and chaos when a major block hits.
In addition to "points of contact" on the site, include instructions
prominently in every issue of every zine.
Include it in the sig file of every company e-mail. Send recipients to
a Web page with information on why this is so important and on how to whitelist (also included in download package).
By the time you implement Level 1, you will have informed customers who understand
the situation and are invulnerable to the nonsense that uncooperative ISPs will
spew back to them. And you will have an open line of communication since that
e-mail address is now whitelisted.
OK, let's move on to Level 1b, the "fixing" part of your response...
Level 1b) Repair the Problem
Find out what you are doing wrong and fix it. Simple enough...
If it's your fault, fix it! No shame in that. There are a million ways
to accidentally trip a filter against you. Simply fix it.
What if you can't find out what you're doing wrong? What if the
filter is not forthcoming with information? Well, this is pretty
basic...
How can you fix something if you don't know what's broken?
To do a "total scrubbing" of all your outgoing e-mail, review Level 0, this time very critically.
Ask yourself, for each point... "Could I be doing that somehow?" The more
complex your systems, the more likely it becomes that you could accidentally cause
a problem that ISPs, mail services, or filters don't like.
So... review and fix everything you can possibly think of. You have to do
it sooner or later anyway. So it might as well be now.
What do you do if you've "fixed it all" and you're still filtered?
Yes, it happens. Zero accountability/responsibility by the ISPs, mail services and filters make it
all too possible. Here's our own example...
Unlike Brightmail, Outblaze (a serious filtering service) does
send a refusal e-mail when they filter your e-mail.
Even better, they provide a
link in their message. In our case, this link sent you to a Web page which supplied the following message...
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Please contact postmaster@outblaze.com if you have any questions or
clarifications, and in order to be unblocked from our network.
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The Web page itself was fairly informative, too, listing a useful set of possible "tripwires" that can get you into trouble with their filter. (We incorporate their information, along with information
from many other sources, in our lists of "best practices" for
you (the sender), and for your host or outbound-mail service, above.)
So far, so good... Outblaze is a responsible filtering provider that provides useful information, and better yet, contact information. ( "Filtering providers" are companies that sell filtering services to large ISPs and mail services. For example, Brightmail sells its filtering services to Hotmail.)
We e-mailed them and they replied with an actual, clear reason
(they wanted us to make our sequential autoresponder
courses "confirmed opt-in," even though users understood they were indeed getting
five e-mails when they subscribed).
SIDEBAR:
More important than this particular case, though...
This was actually the beginning of an entire overhaul of all our systems
(as outlined above). We owe Outblaze a big "thank you" because
it was our wake-up call. But, back at the time,
they only wanted our Masters courses to be "confirmed opt-in."
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Communications were cordial. We had adopted confirm opt-in for other
marketing vehicles.
So we proceeded to do it for all our sequential autoresponder Masters Courses.
Then we let them know it had been done and that we were now compliant,
with instructions on how they could test it.
No reply.
We repeatedly sent them messages.
No reply. Still blocked. And now, confused.
But, back then, Outblaze filtered a small percentage of overall e-mail, so they
were not a high priority emergency. We took this as our wake-up call
to how spam would eventually impact all
honest small businesses, and how it was only going to get worse
and worse.
So we decided to leave Outblaze alone, let them serve as our
"canary in the mine." We evaluated our entire e-mail system...
Our volumes of inbound e-mail were well over 1,000,000 per day, much of
it spam. And, with a large affiliate program, and with a myriad of tools for
affiliates, autoresponders, etc., etc., we had lost control of how much
e-mail we were sending out... and why.
SIDEBAR:
| Our tolerance for affiliate spam is zero, so
we're proud to say it is probably the most responsible group of affiliates
on the Net -- however, there is always the occasional bad apple to police and
terminate. See Level 0 above for how to develop a marvellous record like this.
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Thanks to our "canary" months ago, we started re-writing/overhauling every possible problem area that
could possibly trigger any reasonable anti-spam service. And we are now totally compliant with
every requirement of every service in the world (that we know of -- we cannot know what
spam services may know but refuse to tell us).
But our canary was still not singing. Was it dead in the mine?
We had expected to be dropped from their "bad-boy list," sooner or later, figuring that
they must be extremely sophisticated/automated, and that their software would pick up
our ever-improving/cutting edge e-mail management.
A Case Of Mistaken Communication
We didn't really "have the time" to overhaul every mail system in the company. But we
did. Why?
Because the time has come for everyone to decide if they are part of the problem,
or part of the solution. If you turf what really should belong to you, as "theirs," then you're part of the problem. Continuing in that vein...
The time has come to acknowledge that it is the responsibility of
every small business (that wants to be part of the solution) to
lower the loads that must be processed by the "receiving end." This
Deliver The Mail program
shows you how to both reduce your pain and be a responsible
corporate Netizen.
But this works both ways, of course -- every participant, including
ISPs, mail services and filters, should also do their
part. In other words...
ISPs and mail services should whitelist -- if they don't, customers should
switch to those who honor their marketing commitments to "deliver the mail."
And filtering providers should either take compliant mailers off
the "blacklists" or else provide reasons why they are still being filtered.
We had made every part of our system as clean and tight as can be,
but Outblaze was still blocking us. So we finally decided to contact
Outblaze again.
Sure, we could play games and "get around" the filter by playing the
same shell games that spammers do. But we don't spam.
Instead...
We insist on cleaning systems until our mail is accepted by all (responsible)
filters fairly (not worrying about vigilantes -- there will always be
some folks like that who you will never please -- their credibility
is dropping fast).
So what happened? Yes, it turns out that we were trapped on a "local block" that
required manual removal. Outblaze verified that our processes
were proper, that all of our mail server IPs were in perfect good standing... and we were removed from their filters/blocks within a few hours.
Moral of the story -- when you know you're "ready"... shake the canary.
Be proactive and ask again. The good filtering services will respond.
But... what do you do if a company is far more "BIG BIZ insulated"
and not as willing to simply do "what is right" for whatever reason?
We started this page with a comparison showing how a responsible filtering
provider like Outblaze actually sends you an e-mail at the
moment you get blocked, while Brightmail does not.
We continued it
with the "happy ending" of improved system and communication with
Outblaze resulting in the responsible, correct, response...
our exoneration. And we continue it...
As of the time of this writing, SiteSell.com is still
blocked by Brightmail. Even our most sacred mail (support) is
blocked. And, unlike Outblaze, we have yet to get any
type of reason or resolution from Brightmail.
That leads us to Level 2...
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