An Email Marketing Delivery Report for 2010: Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL & Gmail

Updated November 2009
An Email Marketing Delivery Report for 2010:
EmailDirect is an email marketing solution provider (ESP) which serves hundreds of today's top online marketers by providing all the functionality and expertise required to send and track effective email campaigns.
The information contained herein has been compiled from the experience of delivering millions of permission-based emails. Visit www.EmailDirect.com to schedule a no-hassle consultation or call (916) 439-6938 now.
EmailDirect, Inc. | (916) 439-6938 | www.EmailDirect.comAn Email Marketing Delivery Report for 2010: Yahoo, Gmail, AOL & Hotmail"It's not all about your IP's anymore!"
Sender Reputation as You've Known It
Sender Reputation is like a credit score for mailers. The driving metrics behind that score include: complaint rates, unknown user rates and the number of spam traps hit. Each of the major email providers calculate and track those metrics in order to make an automatic judgment on where your email should be delivered: the inbox, the junk folder or not at all.
Although, unlike a credit score, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Hotmail do not directly share the reputation data they collect. This requires mailers to generate and maintain good Sender Reputation with each of the major email providers.
Authentication, Domain Reputation & User Engagement Metrics Will Increasingly Affect Your Deliverability
Authentication is the idea of proving your identity, as a mailer. While authentication standards such as DKIM, Domain Keys, Sender ID and SPF work in different ways, the end goal is essential the same: the receiving email server can verify that the domain used in the From Address is under the control of the sender. Simply put, authentication proves that you are authorized to send email from the domain you are sending from.
While some form of authentication has become adopted by each of the major email providers, the idea of portable domain reputation has begun to take hold. Now, when sending authenticated email, the reputation generated by mailers is no longer erased by simply changing IPs. With major email providers associating sender reputation to domains, new IPs no longer need a warm-up period while new reputation is established. The reputation associated with a domain is transferred to the fresh IP addresses. While domain reputation represents the most significant recent development to email deliverability, it is important to understand that domain reputation is not replacing IP-based reputation. It is merely another layer of reputation monitoring that major providers use to determine your deliverability.
Beyond sender reputation determined by complaints, unknown user rates and spam traps; user engagement can make or break a mailer's inbox placement with individual users. For example, when a user marks a message as spam, it is likely that all future messages from that sender will be delivered to the spam folder for that individual user, regardless of the message's ability to hit the inbox otherwise. Implementation and use of user engagement metrics differs between each of the major email providers. Read down for specifics on each.
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Mailers must authenticate with either DomainKeys or DKIM to participate in the Yahoo Feed Back Loop program (Operated by ReturnPath) and benefit from existing domain reputation. It is expected that Yahoo will completely transition to DKIM. Yahoo denies using any third party spam filtering devices; SpamGuard is their proprietary spam filtering technology. While Yahoo delivery is still heavily driven by IP reputation, domain reputation will increasingly become a determining factor.
. Yahoo continues to operate a mailer's whitelist, although being on the whitelist does not guarantee delivery.
. As with IP-based reputation, Complaints, unknown user rates and spam trap hits will drive domain reputation.
. While Yahoo does not publicize a "safe" complaint rate to maintain, mailers with complaint rates under 0.5% (sent/complaints) have been found to be safe, as long as unknown user rates and spam trap hits are also low.
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