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

Searching in the Control Panel and API

You will find it is much easier to find specific messages in the Email On-Demand Control Panel.  At the top of the report pages there is now a drop down list of search criteria that will filter your results.  This screenshot below highlights the new search fields:

This new search feature, combined with the ability to sort on an individual column, will enable you to find exactly what you are looking for quickly and easily.  We are continuing to work on this and hope to implement a full-text search in a future update.

Along with searching in the Control Panel, one of our most highly requested features has been the ability to filter the results of API calls.  Now the messagesFailed, messagesProcessed, messagesFblReported, and messagesOpenClick methods allow for filtering on the initial characters of the following fields: MessageID, MailingID, ToAddress, and FromAddress.

While we are excited about these great new search features, we also made improvements to the performance and reliability of our Control Panel, API, and delivery system.  We hope you enjoy your Email On-Demand account and if you have any ideas for improvements please make sure to post your suggestions on our feedback page: http://feedback.socketlabs.com

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.

This year, we are reinforcing our email delivery infrastructure, to make it more dependable than ever. These improvements require that we change the way we handle your attempts to deliver email to addresses that are on your suppression list.

Currently if you attempt to send email to an address that is on your suppression list, we reject your attempt at the SMTP level. That is, we refuse to accept the message from your application. Beginning on February 15th, 2011, we will no longer reject these messages at the SMTP level. The new behavior for our servers will be to fully accept the messages from your sending application, and then log and delete the message without delivering it. In the end – the result is the same.

This change will not impact the effectiveness of our suppression system and it will allow us to log more information about the messages that are suppressed, such as the message and or mailing id. However, if your applications depend on having suppressed messages blocked at the SMTP level, you will have to make whatever changes you deem necessary on or before February 15th, 2011 to accommodate for this change. Suppressed messages are treated like any other message delivery failure, and can be viewed with the other failure data from the SocketLabs Email On-Demand Control Panel or through our API. We suggest that you access this data regularly and use it to keep your local address lists clean.

Recently we have been contemplating putting some of our resources into the Amazon Cloud (AWS) and we have therefore spent a LOT of time experimenting and testing just about all of their cloud technologies. Amazon is solving common computing problems by offering scalable solutions on a pay-as-you go basis. It is a great idea, and works well in many cases.

Enter SES

Recently Amazon has announced their new Simple Email Service (SES). SES is the latest addition to their wide range of cloud services, and it is designed to help companies deliver bulk mail. Perhaps the most notable part of SES is its price which is many times below the current industry average.

So how is Amazon able to offer the same service as SocketLabs, for a fraction of the price? I don’t think that they can – and I don’t think they want to either. Amazon’s cloud services provide decent value, but always with some level of compromise. This is not a criticism, just the nature of the business. Amazon’s services work on economy of scale. However, economy of scale does not transfer well to some services, so there is where compromises have to be made.

Economy of scale does not transfer well to email deliverability. I know this without a doubt from 15 years of experience helping hundreds of companies deliver their bulk email.

Email delivery is a complicated animal, unlike other areas of computing. It is more of a professional service, and less of a data processing service. Much like accountants, lawyers and any other professionals address the unique needs of their clients, so does SocketLabs when it comes to email delivery. Professional services do not work well in an economy of scale model because they involve real human time, not just machines and algorithms.

Email Senders Need More

I think Amazon’s idea about bringing economy of scale to email delivery is an interesting experiment. But at the price point they are working in, I just can’t see how they can offer help to confused or troubled emailers along the way.

Email senders need more than data processing. They need access to a team of experienced experts, that can answer the questions they have, and help them handle any problems that arise. I can see email senders getting frustrated when there is no human to plead their case to in times of trouble, only an algorithm.

The Value of SocketLabs Email On-Demand

• Free, professional support, including 24×7 access to a technician during any service outage situation.
• SMTP access from any email enabled application, so you can start sending with us in minutes. APIs are available, but not necessary.
• Dedicated IPs with select account plans isolate your email from the crowd and put you in control of your own reputation.
• Rich web based and API reporting of messages sent, messages failed, opens/clicks and complaints. Right down to the indivual message level.
• Open and Click tracking tells you who is opening and interacting with your messages.
• DKIM signing of your messages ensures top deliverability with the large ISPs.
• Suppression Lists, automatically block repeat email attempts to addresses which have bounced or filed a complaint.
• Message and Campaign tracking and reporting with user defined message and campaign identifiers.

We Are Still Busy Innovating

We are still busy innovating and have amazing plans for 2011 and beyond. Our code-name Nashville release is due out in weeks and will bring multi-server and multi-user management as well as a freshened UI and a few other goodies.

Please stay tuned for more information the Nashville release, as well as hints to some of the other really cool things ready to emerge from under cover.

Best regards,

John Alessi

Follow me on Twitter: @johnalessi

You may be aware of our suppression system which blocks email delivery to addresses which are invalid or which have previously complained about your mailing. ISPs penalize you for attempting delivery to invalid addresses or addresses which have complained about your mailings, so the SocketLabs Email On-Demand suppression system is a safeguard we put in place, designed to give you the best deliverability possible.

Although it has always been our policy to charge for all messages sent to our servers (including messages we suppress) some of our billing systems were not fully updated, and because of that, suppressed messages may not have been charged properly to all SocketLabs Email On-Demand accounts. With the new update we are rolling out on January 13th, this will be corrected, and suppressed messages will be included in your message usage counts for the current billing period, going forward.

Reduced Charges for Bandwidth

SocketLabs Email On-Demand customers are now afforded a generous 128K average message size. In the past, we allowed 128K average bandwidth per message. The difference between average messages size and average bandwidth per message may seem subtle, but the new switch to base charges on messages size can represent a dramatic savings for our customers. Under the old method of charging for bandwidth, we had to charge for all bytes in and out. That meant that a 64K message would count as at least 128K, since it had to come into our servers AND go out of our servers. In addition to that, there is always overhead related to the network protocols which adds a bit more bandwidth. With the switch to billing based on message size, you get a full 128K per message.

Can I Send Messages Larger than 128K?

Yes, because we calculate your usage by averaging the total of all of your messages. For example, if you subscribe to a plan that includes 10,000 messages, you are given 1,280,000,000 bytes total. (10,000*128K). If your total usage goes over 1,280,000,000 bytes, then we bill you for the overage. Our current overage charge is $10 per gigabyte. By default any one message can be up to 10MB, however you can request a larger message limit by contacting support.

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.

We have come to a resolution on the matter however, and will be integrating SocketLabs Email On-Demand into the socketlabs.com domain immediately. We have built a strong name in SocketLabs, and our goal for this move is to reduce confusion and strengthen the SocketLabs brand.

Effective today, you can access the SocketLabs Email On-Demand control panel from https://cp.socketlabs.com. We will automatically redirect requests from https://www.email-od.com until the end of 2010 when customers will be required to use the https://cp.socketlabs.com URL to access their control panel.

Also, effective today, the SocketLabs Email On-Demand API will be located at https://api.socketlabs.com/v1. We will continue to respond to requests on the old URL until the end of 2010 when the old url will be decommissioned.

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!

Previously all times displayed were Eastern time. Now your dates and times are displayed and treated according to the local timezone of the computer you are using to view the data!

Follow John Alessi on Twitter: @johnalessi