Got email questions? Sending 100k/day is my day job

Postmark's delivery rates are excellent specifically because of a few factors, and among the leading factors is that they are not all-in-one. ISPs treat the two very differently, so separating them is very much to your benefit.

Source: I used to work with the Postmark team, and saw first hand the work that goes into monitoring send style and usage (plus playing "defense" against anything that will hurt their overall sender reputations). It's an incredible game of cat and mouse.

I don't know, and I imagine that information is heavily guarded, or sanitized at least. Deliverability can vary a lot between the top few domains too.

It can also vary week to week or month to month. Not huge amounts normally, but it can be spiky.

I'm not familiar with it, sorry!

With a large ESP like MailChimp or SendGrid you're going to be emailing out on their shared IPs, so your traffic will be one tiny drop in a giant bucket. Your domain's newness shouldn't have any impact AFAIK.

That being said, if you're sending spammy content which your recipients don't engage with, that could have an impact. Whether it's immediate or over time is up for debate.

I've used my personal gmail with mail merge and have had decent results. I think it's a good option because you don't have to deal with any real deliverability issues. Mail coming from gmail is golden.

If your mail gets marked by recipients as spam, though, that could have a detrimental effect. I haven't done research on this but I bet you could find some out there.

We use PowerMTA and host it ourselves.

SendGrid or Mailgun free account + "WP Mail SMTP by WPForms" plugin = easy and perfect :)

What do you mean by control your own fate?

Absolutely. Using self-hosted open-source software takes more time and effort on your part to manage, just technology-wise. Then add on the difficulty of properly spinning up an IP, managing reputation, etc. I, personally, wouldn't bother trying it when there's free plans out there from so many different ESPs.

This too

What I've done is use a tool like ToutApp or LeadCooker to send emails from my gmail account. It's worked decently well.

1. Not sure about verifications, but I think that some providers will respond to a HELO regardless of whether the email exists or not. I could see some providers doing this to catch spammers.

I do know that there's other list scrubbers out there and one thing they do is work against lists of known blacklisted addresses or spam traps. That's kind of grey area stuff though; something to consider.

1. Yea unfortunately reputation, content, and recipient engagement are also metrics that are used to identify (or mis-identify) emails as spam, and those are continuums that you have to manage by being a responsible sender.

I haven't used SES but I would think any large email service provider would allow sending email on behalf of multiple domains as long as they're set up right.

Deliverability is equally obscure to those who actually send the emails; or me at least. For good reason, hosts like Google don't tell you what they look for when scoring an email for the inbox vs categories vs spam folder.

It's a constantly moving target. A lot of it is trial and error, and even then you're measuring against a biased sample set. You might have people who want your emails and tell you they're not getting them. You might also have silent recipients who delete them without reading or report them as spam.

There's tools out there to make sure things are configured right. I like https://mxtoolbox.com . You can check your SPF, DKIM, see if you're on blacklists, etc. There's other tools you can find online or even paid services. GreenArrow (https://www.drh.net) has seed lists and spam trap statistics and costs a pretty penny. But then Fry's uses them and all their emails to me end up in my spam.

Deliverability is a problem that organizations of every size fight with; it's not just you. Lots of twitter notifications go in my spam. same with Best Buy (or Fry's as above) to smaller companies or non-profits.

This is why lots of companies ask their recipients to whitelist them or add them to their address book, to make sure they're not marked as spam.

Would you be willing to forward me such a mail so I can attempt to suggest some remedies? My email should be in my IH profile. I've been analyzing and optimizing such mails (for ourselves, not for pay/third parties) for years with much success, and it'd be interesting to see if any of the rules of thumb I've picked up would actually apply to another company's mail. Of course, they may not! :-)

I'm not completely familiar with SendGrid's static offerings. so I can't really speak to that. Deliverability is a damn black box.

Is the static IP just for you or shared among a certain subset?

We don't send much administrative emails, but when we do there's no testing involved. We do A/B testing but it's usually at a large batch level.

I think there's a use case for doing incremental sends and measuring engagement, but it would have to not be time sensitive and you'd need a very large set in order t reasonably measure things.

Our MTA has backoff handling built in, So if yahoo stops accepting we'll wait.

Specifically its PowerMTA if that's what you're asking. But we use rabbitmq for handling all our eventing.

I accidentally pointed my dev environment at the production db once, and part of the startup process is resetting the db data. I caught it in time for the most part, but I was panicking for a good hour :)

We have tested various strategies and have always found that GSuite has the best deliverability for cold campaigns. There are a few things to do that will help with consistency. Set up your servers correctly, verify every list before you send out, write engaging content to relevant qualified leads, warm up the email address starting with 25 per day, dont send large volumes from any one account and allow at least min 2 mins between each email sent, preferably more.

Don't try and game google as there is no public information on what metrics they use but think Brian on the right track. They also rotate their servers which can also effect a campaign. For testing deliverability we use glock apps and has helped find weak points in the system or bad copy.

Its rough. The best email is stuff people can't wait to read. I'm almost positive Google tracks things like how long people spend reading each email, which parts, etc. All that goes into how they determine engagement.

I don't have any expert advice from experience on cold emails but i think the best you can is be very personal and tailored to your recipient, which is inefficient.

How are you measuring your deliverability rate? There are lots of ways that providers check for spam. It could be reputation of your sending IP, or IP pool, or domain, email content. A lot of it is very opaque.