[PHP London-discuss] Campaign monitor alternative

[Marcus Bointon]

On 27 Nov 2008, at 19:13, Richard Heyes wrote:

> That might be a false economy when you factor in spam controls.
> Companys that do this for a lot of clients will have agreements in
> place that will mean their emails are not flagged as junk.

Not quite true. If you send spam, no matter what kind of agreements  
you have in place, it may still get marked as spam. The big downside  
of managing your own mailing system is establishing and maintaining a  
good sending reputation - it's really hard to do, and takes a good 6  
months to a year. For hotmail you need to be consistently sending them  
at least 1,000 messages per day to qualify for any kind of special  
treatment. That special treatment comes in the form of two services:  
The JMRP and SNDS services (both at postmaster.msn.com). Anyone can  
sign up for SNDS - it gives you stats on sending from one or more IPs  
to hotmail/winows live accounts. You get message and recipient counts,  
complaint count and rate, spamtrap counts, and an overall red/yellow/ 
green 'quality' rating for each IP. This doesn't let you improve  
deliverability directly, but at least you get to see what is  
happening. The quality rating seems a bit vague - I've seen it green  
at 3% spam rate (very high), but red at 0.1% (about normal for clean  
lists).

The Hotmail Junk Mail Reporting Program is much more difficult to get  
onto - they ignored 20+ applications over 3 years and I eventually got  
it sorted out by hassling them through tech support channels. Once  
it's up, whenever someone reports a message you sent as spam, it sends  
you a message saying so, along with a copy of the message. You need to  
parse that out and feed it into your suppression system (you have one,  
right?!). This service will improve deliverability in the long term as  
it allows you to remove people that are reporting stuff as spam, which  
is the main factor that determines whether your messages reach the  
inbox, junk folder, or get deferred, rejected or blackholed.

AOL's junk mail feedback system is much easier to get onto - go to  
postmaster.aol.com and you'll be on it in about half an hour, works  
beautifully.

Neither Yahoo nor Gmail have any equivalent of these services (though  
Yahoo says they are planning a feedback loop). Yahoo has an internal  
rating system, and the only feedback you get is the deferral rate that  
your mail server sees, and I don't know of any open-source mail server  
that can do anything sensible with that. Some services impose rate  
limits on number of simultaneous connections and number of connections  
per hour (which may vary, so you need to vary your config continuously  
to be optimal). You need to go to expensive proprietary MTAs like  
PowerMail ($11k) and Strongmail (~£25k/year) for control of those  
things (you do get something for your money!), and you need to be on  
very intimate terms with your mail server in general - most PHP tools  
think the story ends after calling mail().

Note that none of these services explicitly say they will actively  
help with your deliverability, but if you use them properly, they will  
help in the long term by improving the quality of your deliveries.

There are additional agreements like Microsoft's Sender Score  
Certified. That particular service is difficult to comply with because  
it imposes constraints on content and data that most clients can't  
meet, and trying to use it without that will just backfire on you. To  
go further, you're looking at services like GoodMail and Truste which  
guarantee inbox delivery, but are hugely expensive, and thus only  
applicable to transactional messages (flight details etc).

On 28 Nov 2008, at 09:17, Darren Moore wrote:

> Do the messages not get sent from the domain of the client or the
> provider? I'd love to hear more about this.

The return path at least must be that of the provider (there's no way  
you can expect a client to handle bounces properly, which also has a  
direct influence on deliverability). The from address can be the  
client, but be aware that you'll run into SPF/DKIM checking issues,  
especially with Yahoo, so you'll need to get your domain installed as  
a delegate in their SPF record. Split from/return-path domains are not  
a problem - most corporates that outsource their email do this too.  
Classing your mail as bulk is not a problem either, and in theory at  
least (according to RFCs), autoresponders should not respond to  
messages that have a "Precedence: bulk" header set (especially for the  
client as autoresponders are supposed to go to the from address, not  
the return path).

Overall, because it is so convoluted and intensive to establish and  
maintain the infrastructure to support all this, I wouldn't recommend  
that anyone tries it themselves unless they are looking to do it full- 
time. Though there are some good PHP mailing packages for doing the  
basics, most just don't go far enough if you need serious volume (we  
handle lists of over 1 million recipients). All commercial emailers  
(such as myself) have to deal with it.

HTH,

Marcus
-- 
Marcus Bointon
Synchromedia Limited: Creators of http://www.smartmessages.net/
UK resellers of info at hand CRM solutions
marcus at synchromedia.co.uk | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk/