MONITORING CHANGES IN YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGN
Monitor Delivery Rates By Domain: Track your open and bounces rates by major domain, such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink and others. If one is significantly different than the others, or your experience a sudden change, you may have a filtering or blacklist problem. Monitor Blacklists: Regularly check the major spam databases and blacklists to ensure you or your email provider has not been added. Check your DNS against MAPS and SPAMCOP, two of the more popular black list databases. (You will not receive a bounce message as a result of a blacklist, even though the email has not been delivered.)
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Understand and Monitor Spam Filters: Get to know the more common things that most spam filters, including Microsoft Outlook's Junk Filter. Click here to see a list of many of the major spam filters. Also, click here to view the terms reviewed by Spam Assassin one of the more popular spam filters. (Spam filters also will not generate bounce messages.)
Pretest Your Emails: Prior to distributing your email to your entire list, send a test to yourself and others (make sure you include all the major email services used by members of your list).
Understand How Your Email Provider Processes Bounces: Gain a thorough understanding of how your email provider classifies and handles soft and hard bounces - and manage accordingly. For example, the email ASP used to distribute this newsletter, attempts to deliver to soft-bounced recipients every hour for 3 days. If the email is still undeliverable, the email is then considered a hard bounce. Monitor Changes Among ISPs: After mergers, financial troubles and other announcements, many users of a particular ISP may decide to switch to a different account or ISP for their email. Consider sending an email to members of your list with the domain name in question, asking them if they would like to update their email address and other information.