Monthly Archives: August 2024

Bulking Up: Doing the Heavy Lifting before Sending Email

Quite often email marketers concentrate on the fundamentals of marketing messages:

  1. Audience – Targeting the right group of people for the message
  2. Brand awareness – Using a message that aligns with the perception of the brand
  3. Value Proposition – Leveraging use cases and problem-solving concepts that highlight the value of the product, service or feature.

These techniques work but ignore another fundamental problem of email: how the email is constructed, sent, delivered and received.

The issue of email hygiene is highly important to major Inbox Providers like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, because they are battling to keep spam and unwanted email out of their customers’ inboxes. Email marketers now also need to ensure that their email campaigns meet increasingly more stringent technical requirements to ensure delivery.

The Heavy Lifting for Bulk Email

We recently discussed the differences between Bulk and Transactional email. If you are sending any Bulk Email, you need to do some heavy lifting before the email goes out:

  • Use your Marketing Fundamentals to craft your message
  • Ensure you are sending to legitimate opt-in email addresses – The Days of Unsolicited Email are Over
  • Ensure your email is DMARC, SPF and DKIM Compliant
  • Ensure your email conforms to Google and Yahoo! Bulk Sender requirements (Low Spam Rate, DMARC

After the email is sent, you also need to monitor your campaigns for issues:

  • Is your DMARC compliance rate within tolerable ranges?
  • Did you have a large number of spam complaints?
  • Were there other issues with the email list or your emailing domain?

How does MxToolbox Help?

You can do your own heavy lifting with free MxToolbox tools like:

Or, you can let MxToolbox simplify your work…

Use Inbox Placement to test your messages before sending. Inbox Placement will:

  • Analyze your headers for DMARC, SPF and DKIM compliance
  • Check your email for 1-Click Unsubscribe, a requirement of Google and Yahoo! bulk sender rules
  • Parse your message for common issues like spammy content, broken links and link shorteners
  • Visually display your email, graphically highlighting where your issues are.

MxToolbox Delivery Center provides the email configuration monitoring that you need to:

  • Monitor DMARC compliance rates
  • Constantly check your Gmail Spam rate
  • Analyze other potential reasons to miss the inbox
  • Notify you of issues while they’re occurring to enable quick resolution and damage control

Email is no longer fire-and-forget. It’s time to sharpen your email skills, develop your email technology muscles or the on-going email arms race will leave you behind.

Will Microsoft follow Google and Yahoo on Bulk Sender Rules?

Google and Yahoo! announced and began implementation of Bulk Sender requirements earlier this year. When fully implemented*, these requirements will be an additional level of protection for their users, but also an additional complication for legitimate senders.

But, what is Microsoft, a major Inbox Provider, doing?

Microsoft has its own rules

Microsoft has historically gone their own way on everything. But, on email, they have had a vested interest in maintaining on-premise systems and gradually migrating these customers to the Cloud. With their growing investments in Cloud: Azure, Office365 and Outlook365, they have continued to march to the beat their own drum in how they filter incoming email.

Oddly, in some ways Microsoft was AHEAD of Google and Yahoo!

*As of June 2024, neither Google nor Yahoo! are filtering 100% of incoming email using their bulk sender rules. Instead, they have gradually introduced their bulk sender rules, providing feedback about potential bouncebacks and implementing the rules to a fraction of incoming email to allow legitimate senders to adapt.

Microsoft on the other hand, has implemented the following rules at 100%, since April:

  • If an email fails DMARC, it is marked as Spam
  • If an email has a “mixed” Bulk Complaint Level, it is dumped to Junk.

What are the differences?

Google and Yahoo!Microsoft
Bulk email must pass SPF, DKIM and DMARCAll Email must pass DMARC
Bulk email must have a maximum complaint level of 0.3%Bulk Complaint Level is “mixed”, the email is considered Junk
1-Click Unsubscribe button for all Bulk EmailNot yet required

Passing DMARC requires either passing DKIM or SPF checks. So, here Microsoft has a slightly lower bar than Google and Yahoo! for Bulk Email. However, it appears Google and Yahoo! are still accepting individual emails that fail DMARC and are not classified as Bulk. Read our article on the Differences between Bulk and Transactional email.

Bulk Complaint Level (BLC) is different calculation from the spam complaint level of Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft seems to have deliberately obfuscated their methodology. However, BCL is a similar metric and we expect Microsoft to adopt industry standard terminology and methodology.

Currently, Microsoft is missing the requirement for “1-Click Unsubscribe”. We expect Microsoft to adopt this standard quickly, as well. It is, after all, a simple regex amongst the numerous header and content scans they already perform.

TLDR: Microsoft has similar Inbox acceptance requirements to Google and Yahoo! Bulk Sender requirements. If you pass theirs, you should make inboxes hosted by Microsoft.

There is one major complication for senders to Microsoft Inboxes: Microsoft allows individual domain administrators to increase or decrease the sensitivity of the Spam and Bulk Complaint Level rules. This means that you might achieve the Inbox in for one Outlook365 subscribing domain and end up in Junk at another. Senders must therefore seek to be as clean as possible with their email hygeine.

How does MxToolbox Help?

MxToolbox Delivery Center is our suite of tools and monitors to actively manage your email deliverability across all Inbox Providers. We help you maintain an email delivery setup to get your message compliant with Inbox Provider rules and Bulk Sender requirements.

Use Inbox Placement to test your messages before sending. Inbox Placement will:

  • Analyze your headers for DMARC, SPF and DKIM compliance
  • Check your email for 1-Click Unsubscribe, a requirement of Google and Yahoo! bulk sender rules
  • Parse your message for common issues like spammy content, broken links and link shorteners
  • Visually display your email, graphically highlighting where your issues are.

MxToolbox Delivery Center provides the email configuration monitoring that you need to:

  • Monitor DMARC compliance rates
  • Constantly check your Gmail Spam rate
  • Analyze other potential reasons to miss the inbox
  • Notify you of issues while they’re occurring to enable quick resolution and damage control

Email is no longer fire-and-forget. It’s time to sharpen your email skills, develop your email technology muscles or the on-going email arms race will leave you behind.

Implementing 1-Click Unsubscribe

As part of Google and Yahoo!’s Bulk Sender requirements, emailers are required to provide a clear mechanism that allows a recipient to unsubscribe their email address from the sender’s mail lists with a single click conforming to RFC-8058.   One-click unsubscribe leverages the Email Header to provide a standardized approach including a secure URI for processing the unsubscribe request and a method to identify the recipient to unsubscribe.  If the email is trusted (contains a valid DKIM signature), then the Inbox Provider will surface this unsubscribe mechanism to the recipient

Benefits to Recipients

Recipients get an easy way to reduce their unwanted email.  They simply click on a link or button in their Inbox Provider’s UI and their email address is immediately unsubscribed from the campaign or they are taken directly to a page where they may select unsubscribe options.

Note:  This RFC requires that there be no intermediary login pages or cookies to track the incoming request.  They must go directly to an unsubscribe options page that includes a global unsubscribe option or be unsubscribed immediately with a confirmation page.

Benefits to Senders

Simplifying the unsubscribe process is actually very beneficial to senders.  You improve the quality of the contacts in your email database and improve your email reputation.  Removing low quality, poor performing email contacts allows you to focus your efforts on better prospects.

Improving your email reputation with major inbox providers is extremely important.  Recipients that do not want your email have several options:  ignore it, delete it, unsubscribe or mark it as spam.  When an email is marked as spam, it impacts your reputation with that Inbox Provider. By making the unsubscribing process as easy as marking the email as spam, recipients are more likely to unsubscribe to your legitimate email rather than classify it as spam.   A high rate of recipients marking your email as spam can classify all email from your domain as spam with an Inbox Provider.. 

Implementing 1-Click

Implementation of 1-Click Unsubscribe can be simple.  Many bulk email service providers have their own Unsubscribe systems.  These conform to CAN-SPAM and typically enable a simple single-click-to-unsubscribe mechanism that also meets the 1-Click requirements.  Simply follow the instructions for using the unsubscribe setup in your chosen bulk email service and you should be covered.  In addition, you will need to have a valid DKIM signature for email from this system.

If you are using more than one bulk email sending service or have other email sending services (Order Management, Customized Newsletters, etc), you may need to create your own 1-Click Unsubscribe system.  To be RFC compliant, this mechanism must:

  1. Have a URI that does not require a login to reach
  2. Can accept a unique opaque identifier for the user/email and campaign.
  3. Unsubscribes automatically or provides a Global Unsubscribe option

You must then configure the headers of all outbound emails with the following parameters:

  • List-Unsubscribe: The HTTPS URI the Inbox Provider will direct the recipient to including the unique opaque identifier.
  • List-Unsubscribe-Post:  List-Unsubscribe=One-Click

The email from these systems must also be DKIM compliant for the 1-Click Unsubscribe mechanism in the email header to be trusted.  

How can MxToolbox Help?

Tools like MxToolbox Delivery Center provide deep insight into your DMARC, SPF and DKIM configurations allowing you to meet basic requirements for Bulk Senders. But, more importantly, our Inbox Placement feature will analyze your DKIM headers to ensure that they are 1-Click Compliant and tell you if your campaigns are being sent to the Spam/Junk folders or actually making it to inboxes, as well as which Inbox Provider(s) you are having trouble sending to.

MxToolbox is the Expert on email delivery. We offer a wide range of email delivery services, including a fully managed email delivery service, so be proactive now and take advantage of them before these Bulk Sender guidelines affect your email.