Monthly Archives: April 2020

Case Study: Financial Services Company

MxToolbox has a decade plus history of improving email deliverability for our customers. Occasionally, one of our customers provides insight into exactly how we helped and what it means to their business.

The recent results from a Financial Services company illustrates the way our Managed Services teams increase email delivery and open rates to generate business value.

Highlights include:

Implementing DNS best practices to aid email deliverability
Improving Email Delivery Rates
Dramatically Improving Email Open Rates

Read the Case Study

The End of a Blacklist – BSB

On Friday the 17th of April, the blacklists BSB and BSB Domain shutdown. When a blacklist goes offline, it typically returns a positive blacklisting event for every IP address or Domain inquiry. This is standard but can be a bit alarming for users.

What that means for you?

All of our Monitoring and Delivery Center customers suddenly had a notification of blacklisting on BSB or BSB Domain. This is normal. MxToolbox has removed BSB and BSB Domain from the list of blacklists we check. All notifications that we previously sent of blacklisting by BSB and BSB Domain can be ignored safely. If BSB and BSB Domain return to action, then we will evaluate adding them back into the list of blacklists we search.

The Importance of Email Delivery Management

Blacklisting is not the only reason why your email may be denied or tossed into a Spam or Junk folder. Blacklist monitoring is the beginning of good email delivery management. In addition to monitoring your email for blacklisting, you need to:

Monitor your DMARC, SPF and DKIM configurations for compliance with industry standards
Regularly monitor the blacklist reputations of all your senders; not just your own IP addresses, but every CRM, Marketing Automation, Order Management, Support Ticketing and other sending system.
Actively monitor and manage the DMARC compliance rates for your legitimate senders, eliminating non-compliant senders if needed.
Monitor DMARC compliance rates for Fraud and Phishing attacks using your brands

MxToolbox Delivery Center provides you with the capability to manage your Email Deliverability, reducing the chance that your email will be dumped to spam or junk. Check out Delivery Centertoday, or Contact Sales for a Walkthrough of Delivery Center Managed Services.

Email still going to Spam and Junk?

There are many reasons an email can end up in a Spam or Junk folder. While no system can promise 100% inbox delivery, there are things that our experts can help you with that dramatically improve email deliverability. Let’s take a look at a few reasons why emails fail to arrive and what can and cannot be done to correct it.

DMARC Compliance

First, if you aren’t monitoring email delivery, then you don’t know what your DMARC compliance rates are right now. If you are say around 75%, that’s 25% of your email that fails to make it to the server, much less the inbox. MxToolbox can help there.

Second, our DMARC compliance rates (and many of our Managed Services customers) are around 99.8%, some of the highest in the industry. With the volume of email we send in a week, that’s still several thousand emails that fail compliance.

There are many causes of DMARC compliance issues. Some you can control through better configuration (our specialty), some you cannot control. For example, if you have a large amount of forwarded email, SPF and DKIM will often break, making that email non-compliant. The newly released ARC standard is starting to help reduce that breakage, however.

Blacklisting

Email sender blacklisting is still an issue. If your email sending tools are blacklisted, then some of your email will be blacklisted. It happens and reduces delivery rates. Again, if you aren’t monitoring it, you don’t know about it. We know that some of our sending IPs were blacklisted in recent emails, which may send some email to spam or junk. If you are monitoring blacklisting for all your senders, then you can identify problems with these senders and address them either by working with your sender to improve their blacklist status or finding a sender with a better reputation. Our Adaptive Blacklisting give our customers insight into the blacklist reputation of all your senders.

The Appearance of Spam

Finally, some emails appear spammy to standardized spam rules that inbox providers apply. This is something MxToolbox tests for before every email broadcast. You can test emails too, with Spam Analyzer.

However, custom spam rules and customer behavior are something that no emailer can get around without feedback from users. For example, Gmail applies custom spam rules based upon some image attachments and Outlook.com appears to automatically junk email from senders that you routinely delete without opening. Fortunately, many inbox providers are leveraging feedback loops to provide insight to legitimate senders about their users’ behavior.

Conclusion

No email delivery tool can promise 100% inbox placement. Email Delivery is a complicated balance leveraging existing and emerging technologies to help you business communicate your message. Our Experts spend their days working with these technologies to help our customers improve their email delivery.

If you have learned something from this, then maybe you can trust us to help you.

My Favorite Tools

If you are like many of our users, you have a favorite tool or set of tools that you run often. Our customers have informed us that the “More” page is the most bookmarked page of MxToolbox.com and the one most likely for them to access to do work on a regular basis.

Introducing Favorites

In March, MxToolbox added a feature to our More/NetworkTools page that allows registered users to save a set of favorite tools. Now, you can save a set of tools that you use frequently and access them through the “My Favorite Tools” tab.

Add a Favorite Tool by clicking the heart icon on any tool.

And, boom, you have favorites.

Use Favorite Tools to save yourself time and effort when using MxToolbox. Enjoy!