If you are unfamiliar with the Suppression List page, it can be found in the Control Panel. Once you’ve selected a Server to manage just select Suppression List from the Config tab in the top menu bar.

Once you have selected a Server to manage, the Suppression List is easy to find.

Upon arrival at the newly updated Suppression List page you will see your list of suppressed addresses.  You can now page through and see all of the addresses with the most recent additions first.  We have also added a download link in the top right corner of the data table, just like on the reporting pages.   This will make it easier than ever for you to scrub your lists of bad data, make improvements to your reputation, and improve deliverability.  See the screenshot below which highlights the new additions:

These great new facets have been added without sacrificing any of the previous features.   You have full control over the removal of any address that encountered a hard failure.  Also, the search feature is now a “Starts With…” search.  You can still filter your suppression list to find an individual address in just seconds.

In order to make all these great improvements we overhauled the way in which we store the data in our back-end.  The new optimized database will allow for further features to be developed around this data much more quickly and easily.  Do you have any ideas or suggestions?  Make sure you submit them on our feedback page.

To help everyone understand how addresses end up on the Suppression List in the first place, we added a new knowledgebase article that details how the Suppression features work.  If you have any further questions we are always glad to answer them, just contact us at Support@socketlabs.com

We hope you enjoy the newest improvements! Check them out now by logging into the Control Panel.

Thank you,

The SocketLabs Team

What is 360 Degree Email Monitoring? 360 Degree Email Monitoring is an aggressive monitoring system that we developed to help us instantly detect and correct any bottlenecks that may occur in our email delivery network, and measure real email delivery performance every minute of every day.

Traditional server monitoring only verifies that servers are listening. But just because a server is listening, does not mean that it is doing its job properly.

SocketLabs 360 Degree Email Monitoring emulates a user outside of our network who is sending email through our systems. Each message the monitor sends is tracked throughout our entire infrastructure until it is delivered to the inbox. The monitoring system tells us exactly how long it takes to deliver each message, and if it detects any issues, it sounds alarms that point us to the piece of infrastructure that needs attention, so we can remedy the problem right away.

Monitoring in this fashion gives us yet another way to ensure that we are providing the fastest and most trusted email delivery network available. In the coming months we are expanding our 360 Degree Email Monitoring to offer even more thorough analysis and alerts and even expose this data to our customers.

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360 Degree Email Monitoring is a service mark of SocketLabs, Inc.

In it she also references another great article:

10 Things you can do if your email campaign is going to the junk folder

At SocketLabs, we put all the technology and management in place to help our customers achieve the highest deliverability possible. But there are also some factors that are outside of our control – like the message content – for example.

Both of the above mentioned articles offer excellent advice if you are finding that your mail lands in the SPAM folder despite having all the correct technology on your side.

The Email On-Demand Failure Report which shows all delivery failures, now includes messages which have been suppressed. If you are unfamilliar with our suppression system, follow this link to learn more. Suppressed items show up on the report with the Failure Type set to “Suppressed”. In addition, the Email On-Demand messagesFailed API method now also returns suppressed items by reporting the FailureType as 2. Suppressed addresses, as well as all Permanent failures should be removed from your list as soon as possible. Previously suppressed messages did not show in any report or API, but since suppressed items are actually failures, we decided that the failure report and messagesFailed API were the most natural place to put them. Look for more improvements to the Failures report in the near future.

Faster Clearing of Invalid Domains from Queue

You should notice that your queues clear much faster now. We recently rolled out an update that helps to accelerate the removal of email messages to invalid domains from your outbound queue.

DKIM Signing Bypassed for Messages Greater than 128K

DKIM signing of large messages is very resource intensive and can slow down your delivery a great deal. And due to the nature of large messages, DKIM signing is mostly unnecessary. Because of this, we no longer DKIM sign messages larger than 128K. You should notice much faster delivery times, and increased performance.

Based on our experience here are 5 key components that are critical in providing good deliverability for bulk email and consistently getting into the Inbox:

1. Sending Rules – most if not all of the large ISPs have specific limits as to how many connections and number of messages per connection they will accept from a single IP address.  By not obeying these limits you can get into trouble quickly. These limits change periodically as well so you need to keep on top of the changes.
2. Email Authentication – having properly formatted SPF DNS records, SenderID, DomainKeys and DKIM in place so an ISP can validate your identity as a sender helps build trust with the ISP.
3. Accredited IP Addresses –  having your IP address(es) on an accredited list that is leveraged by the ISPs helps build additional trust with the ISP.  SuretyMail and ReturnPath are 2 good ones.
4. Remove Bad Email Addresses and Complainers – two things that can really hurt deliverability is passing too many bad email addresses or having too many people complain about your email and categorize it as spam.  Immediately removing these addresses from your email lists will help ensure good deliverability.
5. Only Send Email to People Who Have Opted-In to Receive Your Specific Email – sending to purchased or rented lists, old lists, borrowed lists, collected feed lists, etc… WILL harm your reputation and adversely effect your deliverability GUARANTEED!

We’ve found at SocketLabs that we can manage and control 1 thru 4 but, we need the cooperation of our customers to manage and control #5.  There are no shortcuts to good deliverability!

Here are the top 10 indications that someone might be a spammer:

10. They refer to SpamCop (or even ReturnPath) as the Internet mafia – and are pretty emotional about it.

9. They refer to sending email as “blasting”.

8. They use profanity. i.e. F&*#ing yahoo is blocking my email.

7. They refuse to openly give out information about themselves or their business and use a freemail address.

6. When you ask for their web site address, they have a big explanation.

5. Any email they send you goes into YOUR spam folder.

4. They use the word “leads” or “acquisition”.

3. They are not afraid to throw wads of cash your way. (lots of money and no place to spend it)

2. They are eating (and chewing sloppily) while on the phone with you.

and finally…

1. They lead the conversation with: “I’m fixin’ to send me some email.”

This is funny and sad, but absolutely true as well. A good portion of our time is used to vet out the numerous new customers that come our way and determine who is acceptable and who is not.

By keeping only the cleanest of senders we are able to provide spectacular deliverability rates for our customers.

Gotta go, someone is on the phone who needs to send 5 million messages today. : )

Follow me on Twitter: @johnalessi

Now there is a great resource for most of the known bounce codes to help simplify your tracking and processing. The eec’s Deliverability Roundtable has put together a repository of common and available bounce strings senders might see from current ISPs (email receivers).

The forum is setup on Get Satisfaction as a dynamic and interactive site that allows users to request information and update bounce strings as they change. The ISP serving the bounce, the bounce string text and next steps for a sender are written out by bounce code here.

http://www.getsatisfaction.com/deliverability/tags/bounce_codes

Return Path did not state where they believe the email to be, but we suspect that it is floating in deep space, possibly captured in the crystal prison of the three Krypton prisoners from Superman.

Some other notable points from the study:

• It is easier to deliver to US ISPs than Canadian ISPs. Inbox placements of mail sent to US ISPs was 82% in contrast to 75% sent to Canadian ISPs.
• B2B delivery rates are less than that of B2C email 72% vs 79%. This is in strong opposition to what has normally believed to be the case. Accounting for this is the fact that businesses are being protected by ever advancing systems like Postini, Synamtec and MessageLabs.
• In the US, Gmail is the hardest ISP to penetrate and Cox is the easiest.
• In Canada, Primus.ca was the hardest ISP to penetrate and Telus was the easiest.

I encourage you to download the full study, which is brief but very informative, and includes colorful charts and graphs:

Return Path Deliverability Benchmark Report

fbl-test@service.socketlabs.com
Auto responds to From address with a feedback loop report in ARF format.

bounce-test@service.socketlabs.com
Auto responds to the Return-Path with a bounce message.

As a side note, the autoresponder was built using the .Net API in Hurricane MTA Server.

First, now our new Dynamic Block Rules are a part of the Smart Delivery Rules. Now, protecting your reputation is automatic. You can read more about Dynamic Block Rules here.

Second, Smart Delivery Rules can now be updated easily from within the Hurricane MTA Server interface without having to update the entire application.

The Administrative configuration page has a new option to download and apply the latest set of Smart Delivery Rules directly from our database.

With these two enhancements it is now easier than ever to leave things up to us and still be assured of the highest deliverability possible. Enjoy!