During a Q&A webcast, email experts Carly Brantz and Ken Apple addressed various questions regarding email infrastructure and deliverability challenges. Key advice included the importance of maintaining good email practices, using separate IP addresses for different email streams, and utilizing tools like Return Path's Sender Score for monitoring deliverability. The experts emphasized that a bad reputation can significantly hinder email success, and recommended strategies for improving email performance while avoiding common pitfalls.

1. Your Toughest Email
Infrastructure Questions
Answered
Webcast Q&A with Carly and Ken

2. When SendGrid’s email experts Carly Brantz
and Ken Apple answered your toughest email
infrastructure questions, their conversation
sparked more questions that they were unable to
answer during the webinar. Later, they took the
time to respond to some of them.
If you missed the webinar, you can access a
recording here.

3. Q: How do you keep Yahoo (and some others) from deferring your
emails from a dedicated IP?
A: There definitely isn’t one easy solution. Email deliverability is a
science with proven techniques to prevent failures and improve your
delivered rates. If you have the information and tools to manage it, then
you can achieve higher return on your email marketing investment in
the long run. I would recommend you read our Email Deliverability
Guide for more direction on what you can do to improve your
deliverability.

4. Q: If an IP address gets labeled as “spam” by one of the ISPs, is it
possible to “recuperate” the reputation on that? Or is it better to
switch to a new IP address? Do ISPs also have some sort of score
for domain reputation (irrespective of IP addresses)?
A: Email reputation is based on your IP address. Contrary to
popular belief no reputation is just as bad as having a poor reputation.
Using a new IP address should be a strategic move to separate mail
streams or move from a shared IP to a dedicated one. You can improve
your reputation by simply exhibiting good behavior and beefing up on
your best practices and then maintaining that over time.

5. Q: How would you recommend dealing with 3rd party commercial
emails? Would you recommend using a separate IP pool for
these? This is a requirement for example to be able to get into the
ReturnPath certified program, but won’t your IP reputation drop
like crazy when you only send 3rd party commercial emails over an
IP?
A: The reason that SendGrid and others advise against mailing to
third party lists is that it’s all centered on permission. A third party list
means just that, your company did not get permission, a “third party”
obtained the email addresses. Yes, your email reputation will drop, by
keeping a separate pool, which ensures that your legitimate email
streams will not be affected by the drop which will be difficult to recover
from.

6. Q: What free tools would you recommend using for not-yet
SendGrid users to monitor deliverability?
A: I would recommend using Return Path’s Sender Score service at
SenderScore to get instant, free information on your email reputation
and deliverability.

7. Q: During the IP “warm up” phase, I guess it’s assumed that a lot
of emails would land in SPAM instead of inbox since the IP has
no/poor reputation. So does getting a lot of your emails land in
SPAM work against your IP reputation? How to work around that
problem?
A: During the warm up phase, if done correctly, you should not set
off warning signs to ISPs to block your email. If you make the warm up
process a priority and take a conservative approach over the first
month, you should not have many of your emails land in spam. The
warm up process itself is the workaround of being blocked.

8. Q: What is the rule for using the same IP address/white label for
sending both transactional emails and bulk emails?
A: Ideally, you would keep the different streams of email separate.
Remember Ghostbusters- don’t cross the streams! Then, you can
ensure that the higher deliverability that comes with transactional
messages that are both anticipated and wanted, won’t be put in danger.
If that isn’t a possibility, I would encourage you to try and combine
marketing messages within your transactional emails. Ask for referrals,
include follow and like buttons or offer a promotion at the end of your
messages to include a call to action within the transactional message
itself.

9. Q: We are sending double-opt in confirmation messages on a
separate IP address. Once a month we resend a confirmation
message to users who are not very active. Occasionally this will
trip a “spam trap”; is this going to put us in jeopardy of delivering
confirmation messages in the future?
A: I would advise against mailing to “non-active” users all together.
In fact, a good way to get them off your list entirely is to do a
reactivation campaign to ensure that everyone on your list wants to
receive your emails. Sending to even one spam trap will instantly set
back your reputation and cause deliverability issues. When you send to
a spam trap (an email address activated by an ISP to catch spammers),
it means you’re engaging in email address harvesting (an illegal
practice) or your list hygiene practices are poor. Either way, ISPs aren’t
going to deliver your email.

10. Q: What is the best way to send email for maximum deliverability,
Text, HTML, or both?
A: I would always recommend having both. Including a text version
if you are sending HTML emails is a good practice for avoiding a spam
filter and it also covers you in the case where the recipient cannot view
HTML emails.

11. Carly Brantz
carly.brantz@sendgrid.com
@carlybrantz
Ken Apple
ken@sendrid.com