Campaign Emails Mark as Spam by Hotmail

[quacka6]

Hi,

I am using CE 5.1 under windows 2003 and IIS 6 SMTP Service. I set up the bouncer mailbox handling as no-reply@company.com through gmail google apps.

I have sent campaign emails as a test to 20 test contacts, first few went through fine. Now everything is marked as spam by Hotmail. Gmail and Yahoo don't seem to mark the same email as spam.

Using Sugar built in email compaoser and sending the same email doesn't seem to mark it as spam which I find weird.

Can anyone shed any light on this matter?

[REByers]

My company sends out a lot of email every month (billing stuff mainly) and we have an ongoing issue with Hotmail et al regarding how they classify emails as spam.

They all changed their rules about 6 months ago and became much more stringent. Also until we threatened MS that we would go public that their system stopped legitimate email business from working and were working counter to allowing green business they would not respond.

Some of this I can understand as they don't want to allow spam organisations to know their rules, and to be able to register as legitimate email organisations.

Here's the response we got from Hotmail (finally):

During the mitigation period your emails should not experience any issues arriving in Hotmail customer's inboxes. This period will also give our filters sufficient time to learn enough about your mailing practices that after the mitigation expires your mails shouldn't any issues with arriving in our Hotmail customer's inboxes. Hotmail has created group of programs that should benefit your mailings during this time. To help avoid future issues I would strongly suggest enrolling-in or implementing these if you have not already.

1. Segment your mailing infrastructure by IP. Marketing e-mail, transactional corporate, "forward to a friend" e-mail and signup e-mails should be sent from different IP's. This will help to identify what types of messages are being flagged by Hotmail customers.

2. Strengthen the sign up process. Confirm that you are using a double-opt-in sign up process. This will not help in removing existing Hotmail customers from your e-mail lists but it will confirm the authenticity of those who sign-up on for your e-mail campaigns and newsletters.

3. If you have any feedback loops setup with other ISPs you should look for trends to try and determine possible causes - a new data source? New advertisement? Maybe folks signing up don't recognize the mail?

4. Clearly mark your e-mails so that Hotmail customers are able to quickly and easily identify that they requested e-mails from your service.

5. Do some analysis on the data regarding complaints - look at Hotmail customers who have never clicked, opened, responded or bounced in any way. These poor performers could contain many bad addresses.

6. Clean up your lists. Remove those who do not want to receive the emails. Make the unsubscribe process more visible.

7. Enroll in the Sender Score program. This is the only Whitelist which Hotmail uses. It is owned and operated by Return Path. You can find information about this program at http://www.senderscorecertified.com.

8. Please visit http://www.senderbase.org or http://openrbl.org to verify that your IP is not being targeted by any 3rd party block lists.

In addition to these recommendations, Hotmail has created the Smart Network Data Services program. This is a service that helps legitimate email senders work with their customers and partners to reduce spam originating from their IP. http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/. This program allows a sender to monitor the 'health' of their IPs.

Hotmail has created the Smart Network Data Services program. This is a service that helps legitimate email senders work with their customers and partners to reduce spam originating from their IP. http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/. This program allows a sender to monitor the 'health' of their IPs.

Monitor user complaints. Hotmail also has a sender complaint feedback loop program Junk Email Reporting Program (JMRP). Enrollment in this, free of charge, program will benefit you as a sender as it will keep your e-mail lists updated and populated with interested MSN Hotmail Customers. Participation in this program will remove those MSN Hotmail Customers who do not want to receive e-mails from your company. If you are interested in joining this program please visit Http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?pr...ail&ct=eformts.

While using the SNDS tool, enrollment in the JMRP or having your IPs registered with Sender ID will not allow emails from your mail servers to bypass our filters, these are in place to help legitimate companies deliver their emails to Hotmail Customers.

SenderScore Certified Mail Program. Many legitimate mailers and marketers have qualified and joined this "white listing" program to improve mail deliverability and decrease email from being filtered to the Junk E-mail Folder. Sender Score is a third party program, administered by Return Path. Sender Score (www.senderscorecertified.com) is the only White Listing service to which we subscribe.

Please let me know if you have any questions or would like to know more information about any of the programs I have outlined in this mail.

Additional information on common deliverability issues and best practices can be found on the Windows Live/Hotmail Postmaster Site found at: http://postmaster.msn.com/. You may also want to review our "Improving E-mail Deliverability into MSN Hotmail and Windows Live Mail" downloadable document available at: http://www.microsoft.com/safety/postmaster.

The troubleshooting steps in this email are recommendations only, Microsoft makes no guarantees that following these steps will guarantee deliverability to MSN, Hotmail, or Live.com customers.