Mail Mule POST

Online communication is very important for personal use and in business. Among the many protocols or methods of sending messages online, email is undoubtedly the most important. Businesses around the world use this mode of communication to get in touch with their employees, customers and clients.

In case you decide to open a new e-mail account or trace an unknown or suspicious e-mail from your inbox, you want to make sure that the email account you will be using or will be checking is valid and existing. No two email addresses are the same. So, when you try to create an account, for example, you might notice that when asked to input your preferred electronic mail address, it may already be taken by another user. It is also required in certain websites to validate email addresses to find out whether it exists or not before allowing you to proceed with whatever transaction or activity you have. Here are some bits of information you might find handy when it comes to validation of electronic addresses.

Basic Validation

The basic step to simply validate an email address is to check the characters required such as the “@” sign and one “.” in a structured or syntactic manner. This simple process is called syntax checking.

DNS Validation

One of the components of an email address is a domain name. The domain name must exist and must be used by someone who owns an electronic mail address. The Domain Name System (DNS) makes it possible for the mail server to receive e-mails.

SMTP Validation

The SMTP Validation is another important step to validate email addresses. The SMTP communicates with the domain mail server to check if the email id is valid. If it finds out that the domain is invalid, it does not accept it and poses an error message instead. You may notice that when sending emails with email addresses that are wrongly typed or have typos, you will get a notification that the domain name is not recognized by the system and the mail is not sent to the intended recipient.

Using an Email Validator

The use of an email address validation tool is a very reliable tool on the Internet. There are several e-mail address checkers you can find now. The good thing with using an e-mail address checker is that you need not worry about trying to analyze if the domain name or the SMTP server is correct or not because the checker does the job for you.

Do you run email campaigns? Have you ever had to deal with the emails that bounce back to you due to invalid email addresses? If so, you will probably be familiar with the wasted time spent managing your email lists. Perhaps you’ve been tempted to try the many desktop software products that promise to validate email addresses in your campaign lists. Beware – email validation from desktop software can be inherently unreliable.

Does your business use email to keep in touch with your customers?

If the answer is yes, you have probably already experienced the problems that arise from customers who don’t have valid or current email boxes. Does the following sound familiar?

• Bounced emails or Non-Delivery Receipts (NDR’s)
• Having to manually update your customer newsletter list with every NDR from every newsletter or campaign

Desktop email validation

You might have considered using one of the many desktop products available for bulk email validation. Perhaps you are thinking of purchasing one of these desktop products. If so, stop! It has been found that most of these products simply can’t provide accurate results. The big problem with desktop software

Why are there issues? It’s not any problem to do with the software itself but rather where it is being run from.

Checking email addresses for validation requires a 2-way “conversation” between the mailbox you are checking and the software you are using to do the checking.

The problem comes when the server hosting the email box that you are checking. Due to the problems of spam, many email boxes use various methods to check for spam-like SMTP “conversations”.

Your desktop email validation software will simply NOT work if:

• You are running it on a desktop with a dynamic IP assigned by your internet provider
• You do not have a reverse DNS entry for your IP
• You do not have valid DNS/SPF records for the IP running your desktop validation software.

It has been found that the following large email providers do not support email validation from desktop software:

• Microsoft Live
• Gmail
• AOL

There are many others that can be cited but just these results alone should raise questions as to whether desktop email validation software is worth the money.

Server to server checking

It is believed that the only way of validating an email address with acceptable accuracy is using a server (service) based solution. Servers can be configured to talk to remote email boxes correctly. With desktop software, this configuration is simply not possible.

Worth the money?

Are desktop email address software products worth the money? Perhaps some are, but it’s important to know what to expect when you buy a license. If you are expecting 100% accuracy, this can never be achieved with email address validation software. However, if you are looking for the best possible accuracy, you need to be aware that desktop software simply can’t deliver good results. This might be ok for you if you simply want to reduce the amount of management of returned emails from your campaigns. If, however, you need the best possible validation results, server-based software is the only way to go.

Running an online business is simply complicated. There are a lot of things that ought to be considered in order to achieve the best results from it. One of the sensitive aspects of the online business that requires careful consideration is email address validation; which has proven to be one of the many problems online entrepreneurs face today. Validation is important to keep track of any malformed IP addresses and to determine if the email address is valid before they are entered into your database.

In an online business, email addresses are highly valued as they are considered leads which serve as the backbone of every business. It is therefore extremely vital to conduct email address validation to avoid any future inconveniences. Email address validation emphasizes several business benefits like highly improved customer service, heightened reliability of contact information, and the relative increase in completion rates.

Online memberships and subscriptions usually require email address validation in order to work. People who are joining this and that site; subscribing to this and that site may find that task of validating emails repetitive, dull and even annoying. However, it must be noted that a well maintained and a validated email can keep other more serious problems at bay. Things like the closing of the account, termination of membership, hacking of information and the like is at a low percentage for a validated email as compared to an invalidated one.

There are several ways for email address validation. Here, we are going to describe them.

DNS: Domain Name System (DNS) validation checks whether the domain actually exists. This is a major step for you to take to make sure that emails won’t go unused and that there’s a mail server that is waiting for them. Checking for the domain existence works in most cases and is an effective technique in address validation.

SMTP: But in some cases, there are still some email addresses that can still pass through DNS validation. This leaves SMTP validation for the most sophisticated email address validation. In this method, the SMTP protocol is used to reach the domain mail server to undergo manual address validation. Using this method ensures you that no invalid email addresses are left unnoticed.

QAS: QAS email is one perfect example of web service that provides the most efficient method. The software itself runs through genuine software that effectively validates, cleanses, captures, and enriches addresses and all other important details for contact information. Through QAS email it provides the most sophisticated software of today.

In a world, where identity theft is as common as traffic signs, it is important to go out of your way to securing one’s important access to various websites. Considering the fact that email addresses serve as a passport into the cyber world, it is very important to have it sealed, checked and most of all, validated.

If you are considering investing in email marketing to promote your services and drive traffic to your website, email deliverability should be your primary and utmost concern. Realistically, how could you expect a bull run of sales leads when your emails are being blocked and are not even being delivered to your prospective consumers? And, if I tell you that there are companies out there that guarantee 100% deliverability if you subscribe to the services they offer, does that surprise you? I sure hope not.

We are all guilty at one point or another of believing what we read, hear, and see, especially if it puts a few extra bucks in our pockets. It’s often tempting to take shortcuts in life and pay less for services that promise 100% when in actuality, companies are telling you what you want to hear in order to rake in your business. When salespeople have you on the phone, sometimes that little devil on their left shoulder overrides the angel on their right. All of the sudden, the word “commission” takes priority over your business goals and objectives and common sense goes out the window.

Email deliverability is not as black and white as it may seem. There is no formula or algorithm that spells out exactly what you need to do to ensure that every single email you send will reach the inbox of your target market. Sure, there are certain services that may help improve deliverability, but there are no guarantees.

List cleaning and validation is a service that will definitely help in maximizing deliverability. However, if you stumble upon a company that promises that a small investment in email verification services is the only component involved in ensuring 100% deliverability, I suggest you run for the hills. The truth is if you have the best data, but a terrible IP reputation, you can kiss the money you spent on your email marketing campaign goodbye.

The answer lies in finding the right Email Service Provider (ESP) that has experience in managing the reputation of your IP addresses and in guiding you through the industry “best practices.” Among other things, a good ESP will configure your mail server and DNS correctly to enable you to deliver email in bulk, will provide free technical support, will clean and validate your email database, and will give you advice on sending out successful email campaigns.

Disregard the little voice in your head that says you can do this entirely by yourself without a hitch. Swallow your pride. I can assure you that, as a beginner to email marketing, you will drive yourself into the ground with the unnecessary hassle.

As a business targeting success, your work doesn’t end in acquiring email addresses and devising your Unsubscribe and opt-out process. There are a couple of things you would want to ensure are happening in order to keep a clean list and keep running a successful email marketing campaign. It is highly advisable, for instance, to use email validation services to determine validity and metadata information about email addresses.

Here are some steps to take to manage and keep your email list in its healthiest, fittest shape possible.

Here’s a fact: email addresses eventually atrophy or go bad over time, no matter how much monitoring or checking you do. Email users may either abandon an email account (until inbox becomes too full to receive any more message) or shut it down for good. This is why a “bounce” happens – an email that you attempted to send bounces back and remains undeliverable.

More bounces mean more impact on your sender reputation since most service providers believe that responsible email senders delete bad addresses from their lists on a regular basis. As it is, spammers usually have high bounce rates. Would you want to be associated with spam practice or have bounced or bad addresses regularly removed from your database?

It is suggested that you do not remove email addresses as soon as they bounce ounce, because, for example, what if it’s just a temporary technical failure on the part of the service provider? You may keep your email list clean by having a threshold of three to five bounces before removing it from your database. Track undeliverable addresses and make sure that they are removed from your email list, too.

Use a web-based email address checker: it has flags that provide detail beyond whether or not an email can get past a server. Through this, marketers like you get the kind of information they need to reduce bounce rates and improve open rates in their campaigns. To verify an email address also means protecting yourself against getting blacklisted by email messengers.

Many email marketers simply continue sending to their email lists even if many users have not opened a single email in months. You don’t really lose money here, but this scenario impacts your sender reputation score as determined by email service providers. What can you do to address this problem and avoid landing in the spam box for a segment of low-activity email users?

You have to know what is considered “low activity” usage. An active user may be one who opens one email a month (if you send weekly newsletters) or someone who opens an email every three months (if you send monthly newsletters). There is really no metric that you can apply here, which means you should use your own judgment.

Query all of the email addresses that do not meet your ideal criteria for your email database and place them on a separate list. This isn’t to ignore them; you just want to limit your frequency of emails to them. You should also identify those who may be looking at your email but not registering as an opened email due to images that don’t load or those who are forever on a preview-pane view.

Email everyone on your low email usage list and inform them that you are doing regular email maintenance. Ask them if they are still interested to receive your emails (of course with a call-to-action to continue subscription), and if they are, provide a confirmation link or an email address where they can complete steps to return to your main email list.

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click through response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

In this article, we are going to mention 6 must-know tips for email delivery.

1. Permission: Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.
2. Subscriber Addresses: When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.
3. List Maintenance: Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.
4. Message Format: Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A plethora of studies has claimed that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.
5. Content: Try to engage your audience with some compelling and intriguing content. Try to create content which is captivating, engaging, and crisp. If your users will get motivated with the content, then they will definitely read your mail and will become your loyal subscribers.
6. Beware of inactive subscribers on your mailing list: They may not report you as spam, but they hurt your engagement rates and your delivery. Try to re-engage inactive subscribers with special offers or incentives. Do this regularly when an email address becomes inactive for 60 to 90 days. Ask them to reconfirm their subscription before it expires. Beware that addresses that have been inactive for a very long time may have become invalid or converted to a spam trap. Remove inactive subscribers from your list. Quality is more important than quantity – The importance of removing inactive subscribers from your list can’t be overstated. These subscribers don’t open or click, which drags down your engagement rates, your reputation with ISPs, and your delivery.
7. Don’t ignore the nuts and bolts: Testing your list, monitoring engagement and creating a readable message are essentials for a successful campaign. Use an inbox monitoring tool or send to your own seeds at the major ISPs before the main campaign is sent. Also, test the actual campaign to see if any delivery problems occurred in live sending. Go for A/B test to determine what really engages your subscribers. Look at campaigns that performed well (high opens/clicks, low complaints) or campaigns that performed badly (low opens/clicks, high complaints) to determine what works for your subscribers.

By taking to heart these tested principles for creating a successful campaign you will increase your chances of reaching your subscribers’ inbox. Utilizing these keys and employing a trusted email deliverability company will undoubtedly help to improve your email deliverability rates.

It is not important whether your emails are good or not if your email list of subscribers never get to read them. Email delivery is a problem that has bugged list building online marketers for many years. Spam filters continue to get stronger and keep creating more rules that must be followed. Fortunately, though, there are some simple methods that can be implemented to improve the email delivery rate, and here are five simple methods that will give you a better chance of your emails actually being delivered to your subscriber lists.

1. Instant Trigger Words: There are certain words that will instantly set off alarm bells for the spam filters. Once you manage to identify these keywords it is simple to stay under the radar. There are a variety of software options available to help you identify the trigger phrases and a lot of the email delivery service providers offer at least one of the options as part of their package. When you discover which words or phrases set spam filters off you can then become creative and work around them.
2. Encourage Your Email Subscriber List to be More Active: The one thing that the majority of email providers use to increase their spam detection is by tracking which emails the majority of readers open and which emails are immediately deleted. So to be sure that spam filters continue to ignore you, it is essential that your email list is actually opening the emails that you send and also that they are not marking them as spam. The most effective method of getting around this situation is to see that you give your readers what they are looking for from you and keep the things they don’t want to a minimum.
3. Keep a Record of Any Complaints You May Receive: A good method of staying in the spam filters good books is to always track any complaints received. It is important to take notice of what people say when they opt out of your email list. Getting complaints is part of any online business or any business for that matter because it is impossible to please everyone all the time, and you cannot change an entire email marketing campaign just to please one person. At the same time though, it is important that you keep track of any complaints so that you can address any problems that may be coming up on a regular basis.
4. Get into the Habit of Cleaning Your Email List Regularly: Your reputation can be tarnished very quickly by hard bounces. A few are not going to do any damage, but you run the risk of being flagged as a spammer if the rate of hard bounces increases. When you make it a point to clean out your email list regularly you will not only save money as you will not have to pay for undelivered emails but by failing to do this you are not really keeping a tight control of your online business. There are some email delivery services that will automatically do this for you and in this case you have no need to worry.
5. Inform People Upfront what your Intentions Are: One of the worst things you can do is hide from your list. If you intend sending them an email everyday then let them know upfront in their welcome email that this is what you are going to do. There are companies who send a daily email to their list and they continue to get good reviews because their subscribers know what to expect from them. Most people have the unsubscribe option at the bottom of their emails, a good idea is to let people know right at the top of the email that this is where the unsubscribe link is, otherwise, you run the risk of people not noticing and instead of opting out they will flag you as a spammer.

By following these 5 steps you can easily improve your email delivery rate for a successful email marketing campaign.

Email marketing is essentially ‘selling’ a product or service to your subscribers through an email campaign. The process behind it is this: you court visitors to your website to subscribe to a newsletter and in the process of providing information to the subscriber, you ‘sell’ to him or her. You can do this by simply encouraging them to opt-in, or you entice them with a free product with the condition that they will sign in to receive your emails or newsletter on a regular basis.

While this model is a very effective way of selling, it can be tedious and very time-consuming if the process is not automated. Automated email marketing helps to dramatically reduce your effort in any email campaign. Once you have an automated system in place, you will require less effort and time to be managing your subscribers.

Build trust and confidence

The philosophy is that if you are communicating with your subscribers regularly on a given subject, they naturally come to trust you as an authority on the subject, and selling or recommending a product to them becomes easier. Their continuous subscription to your newsletter is always a good indication that they are interested in the subject you talk about.

For automated email marketing to achieve the results you want, there are three important things you need to keep in mind. They are newsletter design, content and scheduling.

Design of your email newsletter

The design of your newsletter needs to be very professional and reflect the subject you are dealing with. The theme of your newsletter always has some effect on your email campaign.

In other cases, consider using plain text in your emails. That makes it very easy to create the newsletters, and they are readable in any email software as well as webmail. Many of the top internet marketers are using plain text in their emails.

Provide useful and quality content

For your automated email marketing effort to be a success, you need to be very particular about your content. This is probably the most important of all the factors to consider because the philosophy behind this marketing model is to establish trust and credibility with your subscriber.

And if you don’t have a compelling content that will stimulate some desire in your subscriber to read your emails, then your marketing efforts will amount to nothing. Apart from having useful and high-quality content, you must learn to create captivating titles and a strong call to action.

How often should you send emails?

The last but equally important factor to consider in your automated email marketing is the strategic scheduling of your emails. While you don’t have to bombard your subscriber with emails at every least opportunity, you have to make sure your emails are scheduled according to what you told your subscriber when he/she was opting in.

Depending on your business and your available time, you can send newsletters daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly etc.

Email marketing is one of the fastest and most effective ways of reaching your target customers. Your email list is valuable and you have to protect it at any cost.

To protect your server domain from being blacklisted, send messages to invalid addresses and increase the performance of your email campaign, you need to be cautious of the email verifier that you use. Before you spend your money on a verifier, here are the features that you should look out for:

The number of emails that you can verify: Different software programs have different capacities. There are those that support hundreds and others support millions of emails. If your list is growing fast, go with a verifier that is able to handle a large list. Good verifier software should be able to support up to a million emails in a single list.

Accuracy: It’s impossible for a human to find out whether an email is valid by simply looking at it. To make your work easy and avoid wasting time on invalid emails, go with verifier software program with a built-in bounce handler. Once you send your first email, the software will determine the emails that are opened and those that don’t. This way the software will determine the invalid emails and remove them from the list. Before you subscribe to a program, take your time to read reviews of the various email verifiers. To save time and money, go with a program that offers 100% accuracy.

Verification messages: To avoid looking suspicious in the eyes of your customers, you shouldn’t let them know that you are verifying their email addresses. This means that the verifier that you use should be able to do the verification secretly without letting the users know about it. Before you make a commitment, ask the responsible company whether they send emails to their users. If they do, you should steer clear of them as you might lose some of your customers.

Greylisted emails: A good number of mail servers make use of the greylist technology in order to prevent spam. Although some of the emails may be marked as spam, they actually aren’t. Always ask the company what they do with the greylisted emails. A good company should allow you to easily see the greylisted emails in one click.

Ease of working with it: As a business person, you have a lot of things that you need to do; therefore, the verifier you use should make your work easy. The software should allow you to feed it a file containing all the details: names, postcodes, email addresses, postal addresses and other details and get the same file as output with just one extra column that contains the results. If the verifier requires you to enter one name after the other, it will waste a lot of your time thus you should stay away from it.

Choose an email verification software wisely because you may find a chunk of options is there. Always select a software which undertakes email verification fast, secretly and with 100% accuracy.

If you want to grow your sales as a business owner then bulk mail services is a profitable solution and it expands your loyal customer base. In fact, It is an advertising media that exert a high-volume sales result. This kind of services can really fulfill your business marketing needs and it is a reasonable solution that can be used for delivering your marketing materials. Using this service, you can be confident that your target customers accept the email packages, which include your marketing materials.

With the help of email services, companies can obtain potential customers and enhance chances of growth with existing customers. These services are becoming one of the most favorable means of approaching a mass audience and you can send different copies of magazines, booklets, form letters and postcards to various addresses. Bulk mailing is a tool that can always be used with minimum expenditure to advertise the products/services that you wish to.

One of the best things about effective bulk mail services is the fact that you can depend on these services every time. When you search for the company that will be offering you with this service, it is mandatory that you take time to know what previous customers think about their service, so that you can find whether they are right for you or not. There are various companies who provide mailing services but you should make sure that you are selecting a company that will give the services you need. For example, if you want to create a mailing list for you, then be sure about choosing a printing company that could do this type of work.

The main benefit of bulk mail services is that one to one communication is available with the target audience. You can create HTML newsletters and send it to the whole world. The newsletter can be made personal which adds more authenticity to the recipients. In addition, a massive market can be obtained economically. There is no need to pay much on advertising/promotion because email costs less than television, radio and print medium.

Although you can mail all the stuff by yourself, it takes precious time. Email services charge a fee, the time given individually for managing large quantities of mail can be used working on the other side of your business.

Bulk mailing helps to build a strong customer base. It can create new leads and stimulate repeat business from existing customers. Small businesses, as well as the salesperson and big retail companies, all use mass emails to reach distributor and shopper.

Effective and targeted mailing lists are essential for doing business. Although it is your job to maintain precise records of customers because this kind of service can only help in keeping your list up-to-date and enhance your approach. It is mandatory to note that if mass mailing involves words like lottery then email services cannot process the marketing material. So, be sure your emails comply with legal regulations.

However, bulk mail services are the new trend in the marketing mix. It is the cost-effective method of doing marketing over the internet. Marketing of products and services has become surprisingly easier with the introduction of the bulk emails. Most of the businesses are converting themselves to online means of advertising because of the wide approach of the world wide web and the lowest cost it can potentially include.