During my career in email, I have worked for a number of companies – one in particular that made use of the practice of sending pre-scheduled or “triggered” marketing emails to their recipients. At the time, I didn’t understand the logic or the impact this would have on the people receiving these messages. Many years later, I now have a better knowledge of what is acceptable and what is not when using triggered emails.

What is a triggered email?

A triggered email sent to a recipient relative to an event, or some kind of activity on with that recipient’s relationship to the sender. For example, I’m a member of LinkedIn, a social networking website. Whenever somebody views my profile or wants to add me to their network, I receive a triggered email, notifying me that I need to take some sort of action. However, not all triggered emails require action. An email send can also be triggered by a time-based event such as an upcoming birthday or anniversary. While almost always automated, triggered emails are usually very personalized, which set them apart from traditional autoresponders

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Recently I had a client come to me that wanted assistance with their deliverability. They are in the business of sending online greeting cards, and wanted to be able to “spoof” or change the “from” line in their emails to be the actual email address of the person sending the card. So, for example, if a person who uses the email address user@example.com, that email address would actually show as the “sender” – rather than the sending address of the greeting card company.

While there are plenty of companies out there that either do this currently or would like to do so with their mailing, what they don’t realize is using this technique could potentially break any authentication methods they have implemented.

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For my blog today, I thought I would share with you some of the tools that I use almost on a daily basis to help clients with their deliverability and reputation issues. While these tools can sometimes provide copious amounts of data, sometimes it takes a combination of them to truly understand the reputation of a sender.

Senderbase:
Senderbase is the world’s largest email and web traffic monitoring network. It aggregates data from over 100,000 organizations receiving email and tracks approximately 5 billion messages per day, equivalent to over 25% of the world’s email traffic. Data aggregated through this service that helps to determine reputation includes:

• Blacklist data
• User complaints
• Spamtrap hits
• Message volume and changes to volume
• Sender industry
• URL frequency

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In one of my previous blogs, I mentioned how old emails can eventually be turned into a “spamtraps” email addresses. To some this may be a foreign term, so I thought that this would be a good topic to discuss this week.

So what exactly is a spamtrap? Simply put, it is an email address designed only to receive spam. It is not meant to function as a regular email address, meaning that the owner of such an address will never use it to solicit email communications, and thus any email received by that spamtrap will be immediately be considered unsolicited.

There are a number of ways spamtraps work. In one scenario, just as a fur trapper will lay out traps for animals, owners of spamtrap addresses will publish these secret addresses in hidden locations on the Web. This enables mechanisms such as email harvesters or “bots” to find the email. No legitimate sender would ever be encouraged to send email to a spamtrap.

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