New Deliverability Boosting Suppression List Feature Now In Beta

(edit 2009-12-16, this feature is now in the production release)

I am very excited to announce that our new suppression list feature is currently in beta. This new feature goes way beyond what is normally thought of when we think of suppression lists. Typically, suppression lists are used to prevent future mailings to addresses that have unsubscribed. Our suppression lists can do that, but also much, much more. Please read on…

This feature will skyrocket your deliverability, and cut loads of administrative work out of the process.

It Will Dramatically Increase Deliverability

How will it increase deliverability? Because, in addition to giving you the ability to specify and block addresses which have unsubscribed, this new functionality will:

  • Automatically block email to addresses which have previously hard bounced
  • Automatically block email to any recipient which has previously complained about one of your mailings

Two things which will kill your deliverability are 1) repeatedly sending to invalid addresses and 2) sending to people who have complained about your email. Imagine how deliverability will soar when Hurricane MTA Server takes charge and ensures that neither of these things will ever happen again!

This is really monumental release for us because it is the cumulation of so many things we have worked towards over the years. We have had cutting edge bounce handling in Hurricane MTA Server for years. (btw, it is going to get even better soon, but you did not hear that from me) Earlier this year we rolled out automatic feedback loop report processing. Now the new suppression list feature harnesses the power of the bounce processing and feedback loop handling to protect your reputation and catapult your deliverability to new heights.

By maintaing lists of all hard bounce addresses, and addresses associated with feedback loop complaints, Hurricane MTA Server can automatically suppress redelivery to those same addresses.

It Will Reduce Development and Administration

How will it reduce development and administration? Because…

It will no longer be necessary for you to do your own list hygiene – Hurricane MTA Server will do it for you – automatically, and accurately.

That is right. This is fully automatic suppression lists on steroids!

Suppression lists can be set at the account level, globally, shared between accounts, etc… It is all very flexible and very automatic. Suppression lists are stored as standard CSV files, so it is easy to interface them with your existing data. Our suppression lists support both plain text and MD5 encoded addresses for extra security.

This new feature is currently available in our latest beta build.

If you are a SocketLabs customer, and would like to participate in our beta program, please log into your support console and create a ticket, requesting beta access.

If you are not a SocketLabs customer, but would like to be, please contact us to discuss it.

Be sure to check out the video above for a walkthrough.

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  • torbenrohde
    Sounds great !
    As I read it this will function even though we don't use any of the bounce-handling or FBL functions in Hurricane - correct?
  • You will need to have the bounce handling and FBL functionality working in Hurricane, but you will not have to write plugins to handle the events. The suppression lists get built by the bounce handling and FBL systems inside of Hurricane MTA.
  • Hi Adam,

    There is not an OnSuppressed event yet, however I am sure we will be adding something like that soon. There are events for failures and fbl reports, and that is what feeds the suppression lists though.

    In the front end you can view a list of your lists, search lists and remove items from lists.

    Yes, something only gets on a suppression list if we receive a response from the ISP indicating that the address is invalid. So there is no threshold because a bad address is a bad address. Soft bounces are not included.

    I hope this helps!

    BTW, I had a chance to purchase one of your PayScale reports the other day.

    payscale.com is really great!
  • Hah! Great! I'm glad you liked your report. Now we need to get you signed up for an annual subscription.

    If an email hard-bounces or permanent-fails... it's totally no good? I thought that some ISPs would send back permanent-fail replies sometimes even when that email actually existed. Is that incorrect?
  • You are right, so we have had to add some rules to exclude some things from the suppression lists. We are expanding that functionality as we speak. So for example if we get a "550 Spam blah, blah" response, we don't consider that a hard bounce. We analyze not only the code, but the surrounding text. These rules will be customizable too.
  • Sorry to keep asking questions but...

    This extra logic you added in... is that only for Suppression lists? or is it also used in the classification of permanent-fails?

    If I were writing a plugin for handling my failures, and I said: "unsubscribe anything that permanent-fails"... would I be unsubscribing too many people?
  • No problem with the questions, that is what we are here for. There is a special file deliverstatuscodes.list that you can create in your config directory to specify similar logic for failures. It is based on regular expressions. If you want to set that up, please open a support ticket as I don't personally know the format for that file, but support does.
  • Tanks John. I've opened the support ticket, and I'm looking forward to getting this new logic in place :-)
  • A couple of questions about the suppression lists:
    * Are the suppressions available in the Plugin SDK? Is there now an "OnSuppressed" event?
    * Are the suppression lists availabe in the API?
    * Is there a feature to view a suppression list in the web frontend??
    * I'm assuming that when an email fails, it's only including hard bounces and permanent failures?
    * Do you have the ability to set a threshold on the number of bounces/failures before they get suppressed?

    Thanks John! I'm really pumped for this new feature.

    --
    Adam
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