The problem with free email senders

In small business and in some cases medium-size business finding and measuring client responses to email has been somewhat difficult.     We are all sending different types of email every day, but do we know if our clients read it?

Typically, my clients use gmail or hotmail based email services and we route the transactional mail by that service.  However, with the exception of the occasional bounce reply – we almost never find out if our email is being read or when it is read.

Transactional mail is the mail you send out as part of the day to day business – invoices, receipts, reminders etc.  Typically you want to segregate this service away from any newsletter or marketing emails you might send, to avoid reputational damage.

Hangon whats reputational damage? 

Your email is sent from an IP address – this might be your webserver, your application server, or a third party server.  If that IP address’s reputaton is damaged then it may end up on blocklists – this occurs when users flag mail received from that IP as spam, some ISP will also flag at the account level.

This is why you want to ensure your marketing emails are sent from a different IP compared to your transaction email.

Once this damage is done it is a royal pain to get your IP removed and whitelisted.  Tthe image to the right shows the reputation of one of sendgrids IP’s – atleat 1300 different domains send email from the IP – any damage by one of domain will affect the others.  Even if you have a pretty good reputation some providers will black flag that IP when so many different people use it – or if thier uses have reported spam.  The IP address to the left cannot currently send any mail to any microsoft email system – that includes hotmail, and outlook.com