Return Path has signed a deal to acquire Habeas and it is expected to close within a couple of weeks.

According to Return Path CEO and Chairman, Matt Blumberg, “The one thing we do know at this point is that we will be maintaining both Sender Score Certified and the Habeas SafeList as separate and distinct whitelist programs indefinitely. So for now, it’s business as usual.”

Some of the benefits notes are:

• increased scalability
• more and better data products
• expanded service levels
• access to a broader “footprint” of ISPs and filters
• greater base of knowledge from addition of Habeas employees

Return Path and Habeas are partners of SocketLabs, Inc. With the merger SocketLabs will be even more empowered to offer its customers extended deliverability services to augment Hurricane Server.

You can read Matt Blumberg’s blog post regarding the acquisition here.

Or you can read the press release here.

According to ReturnPath’s newly released Q2 2008 reputation benchmark report, properly configured MTAs are over 200% more successful at delivering messages.

The report studies a significant sample of email messages received by ISPs and their ultimate outcome i.e. delivered, filtered, rejected, etc…

The report underlines how important it is to have a properly configured mail server. In the report improperly configured email servers are classified as Illegitimate and, according to ReturnPath’s data, these illegitimate (improperly configured) servers have a delivery rate of less than half of that of properly configured servers.

This report is very insightful, 5 pages, and includes great colorful charts. I would highly recommend it to any email sender.

You can get the report here.

If you are having deliverability issues with Hotmail, you are not alone. Outside of Yahoo, Hotmail seems to be the most problematic domain, especially for new senders. Hotmail delivery can be very challenging and Hotmail is notorious for vaporizing your email without warning. So this brings up two issues.

1. How do you know if your mail is landing in the spam box, or worse, being vaporized.
2. If you find a delivery problem, how do you correct it.

Detecting deliverability problems with Hotmail

The first place to look is in your logs. If you are seeing a large number of deferrals or failures to Hotmail, the Hotmail server responses in the log entries will give you an idea of what the problem is. It may be that you need to throttle back delivery to Hotmail, or make some other configuration change on your MTA or in DNS.

Next consider setting up a Hotmail account or two and put the addresses on your mailing list. That way you can periodically log into your Hotmail account and see if your messages are making it to the inbox. (While you are at it - check your rendering.) This is easy to do yourself, however there are mailbox monitoring services available that will do this for you (for a fee) and will work with many of the important ISPs.

Correcting Hotmail Issues

Hotmail is also notorious for penalizing mail from unfamiliar IP addresses. If you are sending email from an IP that has not had much use recently for mail, this may be the case. As you send more mail over the IP, and Hotmail becomes familiar with it, more of your mail should get through.

Another option is to sign up for a whitelisting or accreditation service. SocketLabs has partnerships with the major providers of these services and can help you select one to suit your needs.

Finally, here is a great resource from Microsoft for troubleshooting Hotmail deliverability problems, including a support contact:

http://postmaster.live.com/Troubleshooting.aspx

On May 12 the FTC announced its approval of four rule provisions to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. These provisions are summarized as follows:

Opt-out Requirements Clarified
To submit a valid opt-out request, a recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her email address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply email message or visiting a single page on an Internet website.

Definition of “Sender” Modified
The definition of the term Sender has been modified to make it easier to determine who is the Sender of an email message when it contains content from multiple companies, advertisers, marketers or other parties. The Sender has certain responsibilities such as listing their physical address, processing opt-outs, etc…

PO Boxes OK
A post office box or private mailbox established pursuant to United States Postal Service regulations may be used as the valid physical postal address of the sender.

Definition of “Person” Added
A definition to the term “person” was added to mean “an individual, group, unincorporated association, limited or general partnership, corporation, or other business entity.”

The effective date of these provisions will be 45 days after date of publication in the Federal Register, which should happen any day now.

It is highly recommended that you read the official FTC Press Release and FTC Detailed Notice to find out more about these changes and how they may affect your current practices.

Most, if not all of the large ISPs judge your reputation largely based on the feedback they receive from their users regarding your mail. Generating too many complaints over a period of time puts you on the fast track to getting blacklisted.

Lets look at Yahoo. Getting email to Yahoo recipients is always challenging. If you are getting any one of the following errors it is most likely due to user complaints:

451 Message temporarily deferred - [numeric code]
421 Message temporarily deferred - [numeric code]
421 Message from (x.x.x.x) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50

Yahoo seems to be dynamically blocking IPs based on user complaint rates, however the good news is that they have been automatically releasing these blocks in relatively short time, i.e. a few hours. Other ISPs might not be so quick to forget. And in any event, even a few hours can really set you back.

Solving this problem, is really no different than what email marketers should be thinking about anyway, and that is how to lower user complaint rates. There are several things you can do right now to reduce your complaint rate and I will cover them in this post.

Frequency / Content

Many studies have been conducted in this area and user complaint rates seem to be controlled by two factors: a) the content of your message b) the frequency of your message. And there is a relationship between the two factors: the message content will affect the frequency one is willing to accept.

If you are sending out a coupon to your entire list every day this is most likely going to generate complaints. If however you are sending important alert messages - alerts which are deemed important and valuable by the recipient - this may be perfectly ok.

The bottom line here is not to annoy people - it is that simple.

Removal Process

Another item you should always consider is the removal process you provide to your recipients. You can lower your complaint rate by simply providing an easy to use removal link in your message. Also include your mailing address and phone number. Not only does this help you comply with CAN-SPAM but it also signals to your recipient that you are not trying to conceal your identity, or misrepresent yourself.

Recognition & Relationship

Send email only to people that will recognize who you are and recognize their relationship with your or your business. If you have no relationship with a recipient, they will most likely consider your email spam. Furthermore, in this situation they have no basis for trust and are far more likely to report your mail as spam rather than follow your removal instructions.

Slow Down Your Delivery

There are always going to be some complaints no matter what you do. Complaint rates are usually based on the number of complaints over a period of time, Slowing down your delivery will spread the complaints out over a longer period of time and therefore reduce the overall complaint/time ratio. Products like Hurricane Server and SMTP Express Pro enable you to shape traffic to specific domains and you can use this functionality to throttle back delivery to certain domains like yahoo.com to instantly reduce your complaint/time ratio.

Spread Out

Complaints rates are usually aggregated by the IP address that generated the email. By spreading out your messages over multiple IPs you can decrease the number of complaints per IP overall.

One issue you should take into consideration however is the effect this will have on greylisting. Greylisting systems will often whitelist your IP/sender/recipient combination once you get a message through. This goes a long way to increasing future delivery rates, however if you send the same sender/recipient combination over a different IP, that whitelist may not apply and your message will be greylisted once again. You simply have to weigh the pros and cons of this approach.

All of the Above

Each one of these tips will decrease the complaint rate and thus improve your deliverability and reputation. When they are all used together they become synergetic and will go far to increasing your deliverability by reducing your complaint rates.

The latest build of Hurricane Server includes native support for tracking opened mail messages as well as click-throughs. Not only that, but it is fully automated and so simple to use. To make this happen, two main pieces had to come together: 1) we needed to include a web server dedicated to catching open and click events sent from HTML email messages and 2) we needed to automatically encode the HTML email sent through the server so that open and click events would be directed back to Hurricane Server.

To get open and click tracking working all you need to do is to enable and configure the tracking options and put a special tag in the HTML of your outbound email.

Global Configuration
In the global server level configuration you enable the tracking system and server, and also specify the base url (the URL back to this Hurricane Server), and the IP and port to listen on.

Account Configuration
In the account level configuration you enable open and/or click tracking for each account you want to use this feature.

How Does Open Tracking Work?

When the global tracking system is enabled, and the open tracking option is enabled on an account, Hurricane Server scans HTML body parts of injected email from that account for an <HsTracking/> tag. When it encounters one, it rewrites the tag like this:

Original Tag:
<HsTracking/>

Rewritten Tag:
<img src="http://[hurricane server address]/[encoded information].gif” width=”0″ height=”0″ border=”0″>

[hurricane server address]
This value is specified in the global Click/Open Tracking configuration and should be the public internet address of your Hurricane Server.

[encoded information]
This value is encrypted and will contain the account id, system message id, custom message id and mailing id for this message.

When the message is loaded into an HTML email reader that displays remote images, a request is sent to your Hurricane Server for the image. Hurricane Server decodes the encoded information, adds the details into its logs, updates its statistical database and calls any plugins which handle the tracking events. Hurricane Server then returns a 5×5 pixel transparent gif which is displayed in your message. The image display should not affect your message since it is transparent and sized at 0×0 pixels in the tag created by Hurricane Server, however it is recommended that you put the tag just before the closing body tag to decrease the chance that it will affect the display of your message.

How Does Click Tracking Work?

When the global tracking system is enabled, and the click tracking option is enabled on an account, Hurricane Server scans HTML body parts of injected email from that account for anchor tags with a HsTracking attribute. When it encounters one, it rewrites the tag like this:

Original Tag:
<a href="http://mysite.com/linkdestination/" HsTracking>Click Here</a>

Rewritten Tag:
<a href="http://[hurricane server address]/?r=[encoded information]“>Click Here<a>

[hurricane server address]
This value is specified in the global Click/Open Tracking configuration and should be the public internet address of your Hurricane Server.

[encoded information]
This value is encrypted and will contain the original href, as well as the account id, system message id, custom message id and mailing id for this message.

When someone clicks the link in their HTML email reader, it sends them to your Hurricane Server which decodes the encoded information, adds the details into its logs, updates its statistical database and calls any plugins which handle the tracking events. Hurricane Server then redirects them to the destination specified in the href attribute of the original anchor tag.

If you want to setup an artificial environment to test Hurricane Server’s processing and speed, and you have another Hurricane Server you can run the second Hurricane Server server in a special mode that will cause it to accept all mail from the first Hurricane Server server and simply vaporize it.

Here is how:

VERY IMPORTANT - AFTER FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW, PLEASE TEST THE SETUP TO MAKE SURE MAIL IS NOT GETTING OUT. IF THINGS ARE NOT SETUP RIGHT IT CAN HAPPEN. USE THIS SETUP AT YOUR OWN RISK. DO NOT PUT ANYTHING IN THE TEST MESSAGES THAT WOULD CREATE A PROBLEM IF IT ACCIDENTALLY GOT OUT!!

SERVER 1 (The sender)

On the sending server, go into the Account configuration for the account you will be sending the mail through and edit the Delivery Rules. Add a delivery rule and specify “*” as the mask, enable the relay option and specify the IP of the receiving server as the target of the relay. If you will be sending to an account on the receiving server other than the Anonymous account, you will also need to enter the user name and password for that account. Save this rule and make sure that it is positioned at the top of the list. This will force all outbound mail to this account to go through the receiving server regardless of its destination address or domain.

SERVER 2 (The receiver)

Use a text editor like notepad to modify the second server’s global general.config file and add “DropIncomingMessages = true” in the [General] section:

i.e. notepad c:\Program Files\Hurricane Server\config\general.config

[General]
DropIncomingMessages = true

If you are going to relay mail to the anonymous account on the receiving server you will need to make sure that the sending servers IP address is in the receiving server’s white list. To do this, open the web management interface on the receiving server and go into Configuration:White / Black Lists and add the IP of the sending server to the white list.

Then go to Dashboard:Overview on the receiving server and stop the Store service which will also stop the sender and the receiver. Then restart the store, sender and receiver services on the receiving server.

Now all mail from Server 1 should go to Server 2 and simply get destroyed.

Cleaning Up

When you are finished your testing, please make sure to delete or disable the “*” rule you added on the sending server’s account, and remove the DropIncomingMessages config setting on the receiving server. The store, sender and receiver services on the receiving server will need to be restarted for the new config to take effect. Optionally remove any whitelist entry you may have made on the receiving server.

Monitoring the age of messages in your queue is a great way to monitor the health of your server and ensure that messages are being processed in the expected time frame. We recently rolled out an update to Hurricane Server that allows you to view the age of the oldest message in each account. This is available on the Queue Detail dashboard. If you zoom in on any particular account, you can even see the age of the oldest message in queue per domain. See image.

With the introduction of SocketLabs, Inc. and Hurricane Server I want to take a minute to state that Quiksoft will continue to develop, sell and support SMTP Express, and SMTP Express Pro. We have been discussing some performance updates to SMTP Express Pro and will be rolling them out as time allows. SMTP Express Pro is a great, high performance bulk mail server and we will continue working to keep it that way.

The last prerelease version of Hurricane Server expired at the end of August and Hurricane Server was quietly released. Unfortunately we have been so busy focusing on the software that we are behind on getting the new SocketLabs website up and running.

We have however released, and are actively selling Hurricane Server. Within the next few weeks we will be launching the SocketLabs website.

Until then if you are interested in purchasing Hurricane Server to use in your organization or if you would like a live demo, please contact us at sales@socketlabs.com.