As you can see in the screenshot to the left there is new a “Remove” button next to a complaint’s details on the suppression list page.

We encourage you to give as well. If you would like to you can use this link to donate to the American Red Cross with a promise from Electronic Arts to match your gift:

Make a donation to the American Red Cross which will be matched by Electronic Arts

More information from EA here.

We put up a SocketLabs Japan Earthquake Relief page on Facebook, and we will donate $1 for every Like of this page between now and March 31, 2011 up to $10,000 to help provide humanitarian relief for the people of Japan affected by the Earthquake and Tsunami.

Please visit this page and click the Like button to help out.

And if you fee so inclined, we encourage you to donate yourself. Here is a link to a list of charities collecting for this relief.

Here is what is new today:

Multiple SMTP Servers

Now you can create multiple servers in your account. By creating additional servers you can separate mail of different priorities, classes, or organizations. Each additional server has its own dashboard, as well as its own statistics, reports and API. Additional servers can be created on any account and managed centrally.

Multiple Users

Another new feature in the control panel is the ability to create additional users. Each user has full access to the control panel and all servers on the account. Extra users are great, when you need to share the administration duties with others on your team.

New Notification Options

To send account related email to additional addresses, just add them to the Notifications list. The Notifications list is great for distribution lists and SMS addresses too.

Other New Features

• Report data of virtually any size can be downloaded to CSV
• Easier retrieval of lost login information, with only an email address required
• SMTP credentials are now available in the control panel
• Numerous aesthetic enhancements to the UI

Coming Soon

In addition we have a brand new API coming in the very near future which will enable complete control of these new features, such as server and user management as well as more robust statistics querying capabilities.

That’s not all

Within the next few weeks we will be transitioning onto a completely new SMTP infrastructure designed for even higher availability. We will post more about that in the coming weeks. Rest assured that we are working very hard to provide the highest deliverability, availability and service available.

Currently the messagesProcessed method of the SocketLabs Email On-Demand API returns both successfully delivered and failed email message events. This is redundant, as another method, messagesFailed, already returns events for failed messages. Since we store data in the manner similar to the way that it is returned by the API, this is causing duplication of data on our servers. By removing the duplicated data, we can reduce the resource usage on the API servers and increase your API performance.

Effective February 10th, 2011, the messagesProcessed method should no longer be used to retrieve events for failed messages. If you are using the messagesProcessed method to retrieve failed message event data, you should change your code to retrieve this data from the messagesFailed method instead.

If you would like to view the updated API documentation it can be found here:

http://www.socketlabs.com/od/api

Our customer base grew over 500% in 2010 and we are truly thankful for your support. We have many new, exciting initiatives planned for 2011, all designed to improve your email delivery success. 2011 looks like it is going to be another exciting ride. Thank you for sharing it with us.

All the best,

John Alessi
President/CEO

We all tend to see things through the lens of the past. We get new tools, but try to use them like the same old tools we have had for years. I wonder if the first person to hold a screwdriver, flipped it around and tried to use it to bang in a nail?

I am approached by a lot of marketers, who have a lot of experience in traditional forms of marketing and advertising, and who are now trying to apply that to email. Specifically, they want to deliver a message to a crowd of people – without regard for the fact that some of these people might not care to receive it.

This does not work with email. Email is different. Very different.

To effectively market using email, you need to know – and ACCEPT that it will NEVER, EVER be easy to send email messages to people who do not want to receive them. AND if you try, it is very, very likely that these unhappy recipients will cause you swift, immediate and long lasting pain by destroying your ability to even reach the people who would be receptive to your messages.

How can this be? Why is email different than traditional advertising like billboards, magazine ads, postal mail, television advertisements, telemarketers, etc…

EMAIL IS INTERACTIVE. Recipients can easily fight back by simply clicking the spam button or forwarding the message to a service like spamcop.

THE RECIPIENT CAN CAUSE YOU IMMEDIATE PAIN IF YOU DISPLEASE THEM. With just a click, the recipient can report your mail (spam or not). These reports get immediately funneled into central databases (blacklists) which are often even shared by multiple ISPs. If you generate too many of these complaints, many ISPs will stop accepting your mail period.

Why do the ISPs care? Because the ISP is a link in the channel and the recipient is a customer of the ISP. There are a zillion ISPs competing to please and retain their customers. For example, if I am using a gmail.com email address, then I am a customer of Google (the channel). They want me to be happy, and only want me to receive the email that I want. Otherwise I will go use some other mail service, and they will loose my eyes, and thus ad revenue. They are doing what they can to block the mail I don’t want to receive.

“But I am not sending SPAM,” you say? I should hope not. But just because you don’t consider your messages “SPAM” does not mean that they will be welcome by the people you are sending them to.

Remember this rhyme and make it your golden rule: If it causes the recipient to complain – it will cause you pain.

Forcing messages on someone is not going to ever be easy or effective with email. Bad lists are easy to find, but impossible to use.

But if you have a list of people who have REALLY opted in to receive YOUR messages.
Email marketing can be easy and rewarding. Good lists, built organically over time and kept clean, are an extremely effective, low cost, and deliver an incredibly high ROI.

My advice to any marketer is that the sooner they accept this reality, the sooner they can start building a successful email marketing system.

We have been using an automatic suppression list for all SocketLabs Email On-Demand accounts since day one, but until now, it was hidden, and behind the scenes. In case you don’t know, our automatic suppression lists are an extremely powerful feature of SocketLabs Email On-Demand that dramatically increases your deliverability by:

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

With the new suppression list report, you can see and search for email addresses on your suppression list, and even remove them if they are erroneous hard bounces.

Two things which destroy your deliverability are repeatedly sending to invalid addresses and sending to people who have complained about your email.

The SocketLabs Email On-Demand automatic suppression lists always work magically without any effort on your part. Now, if you want to manage them, you have the option!

The Quality Score is a measure of how well we think your email is performing on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

It is important to note that the score is based solely on factors relating to your email lists, content and practices. At SocketLabs we are doing everything that can be done from a technology perspective to improve your deliverability, however deliverability is also based heavily on the quality of your lists, content and practices. We (at SocketLabs) can not do anything to increase your Quality Score. It is based solely on factors exclusively under your control.

The Quality Score is based on a number of factors including:

How many invalid vs good email addresses you have tried to deliver to
How often your email is marked as spam
How often people complain about your email

The score is recomputed every day and takes into account a variable window of activity extending into the past.

This is a beta feature for now as we are continually working on improving the algorithm which computes the score.

Follow me on Twitter: @johnalessi

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.