Nonprofit organizations of all sizes are facing considerable challenges as they reach out to their supporters using email. The advantages of this communication method - instant, low-cost access to an organization's audience, with personalization and tracking capabilities unavailable via direct mail or telemarketing - remain compelling, but are being undermined by spam. The messaging management firm Postini currently estimates that more than 73% percent of all email is spam. As the volume of unsolicited, objectionable, and fraudulent email has increased, recipients are understandably raising barriers to protect their inboxes. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) now compete for subscribers based on their ability to control spam and provide a secure online communications experience.
As email recipients have moved to rapid adoption of spam controls, messaging by nonprofits encounters an increasing number of delivery barriers. Legitimate mail may be refused for delivery, or routed to bulk spam folders, or mangled to remove images or disable hyperlinks. Such "collateral damage" is too often considered an acceptable cost of controlling the spam flood. Organizations need to understand how technical trends in spam controls will impact the overall deliverability of their email communications, and what they can do to ensure their messages reach a supporter's inbox. Strict adherence to best practices in regard to permission-based list building and emailing will be critical if nonprofits want to continue to enjoy the significant benefits of this form of communication.
Who Controls Email Delivery?
Contrary to the expectations of many email publishers, there is no technical or legal requirement that ISPs or other mail gateways accept every email sent and ensure delivery to intended recipients. Each mail system can establish its own rules governing access to its inboxes, and then enforce these rules using any of the anti-spam solutions available on the market. While email recipients are gaining access to tools that can effectively control spam, this actually increases deliverability challenges for legitimate email publishers. You have probably already encountered delivery barriers created by "solutions" that rely on "challenge-response," "whitelists," "blacklists," content filters, distributed spam detection networks, etc. Barriers may be raised at multiple points along the path an email takes to the inbox, making it difficult to ascertain exactly where or why your messaging is being blocked.
Because few of the systems in use are inter-operable, solving a delivery problem associated with one product or getting whitelisted by one mail system does not necessarily help with the next barrier.
While the delivery landscape is growing increasingly complex, most anti-spam systems actually rely on a relatively small number of parameters to sort the good mail from the bad. Most important is the reputation of the mail server sending messages: Has that IP address or domain sent spam in the past? Is it compliant with Internet mail standards? Is it on whitelists that the recipient system uses to identify good mail, or on blocklists used to identify spammers? Some aspects of a sender's reputation are purely technical, but reputation is now primarily based on the number of spam complaints an email publisher generates. The greater the number of spam complaints, the more likely your email will encounter delivery barriers across the entire range of anti-spam systems. Ultimately, control over delivery is being distributed to recipients, and this is good news for permission-based email publishers: if you keep your complaint rates low, your communications will encounter far fewer delivery barriers.
navigating new paths to the inbox What Should You Do?
Adhere strictly to permission-based messaging. The best defense against a poor mail reputation and public stigmatization of your organization as a spammer remains strict adherence to opt-in list-building practices.
Review your spam complaints and unsubscribe requests regularly to identify any email acquisition methods that fail to obtain explicit permission, such as co-registration, list sharing, etc. Don't be tempted by CAN-SPAM's legitimization of unsolicited messaging and opt-out - ISPs are not required to deliver CAN-SPAM-compliant email and will raise delivery barriers to any unsolicited mail, whether or not it is commercial spam. Nonprofit or political communications are subject to the same set of rules: If a mailing is unsolicited, it will generate complaints; if it generates complaints, delivery barriers will go up, and your mail reputation will go down.
