E-mail is the most important form of communication with our members. Although it is primarily the responsibility of our members to assure that they select and use a reliable Internet Service Provider (ISP) and that their e-mail account is functioning, the validity of our member’s e-mail addresses is a major concern for our company. This article is meant to educate you on what we have learned about this subject over the years and what you can do to prevent unexpected problems from occurring. Rest assured that we are extremely concerned about this problem’s effect on our obligations to our members and on the speed of service provided to our leads.
Almost every hour we receive notices that our lead notification e-mails were undeliverable or rejected. In the past, we have assumed that the member is either no longer in business, no longer wants to participate, or that they have changed companies. We were therefore forced to block such members from further notifications and to recruit a replacement. If we were to continue attempting to send e-mails to these rejected addresses, we stood the risk of having our e-mails identified as spam by that ISP, which would result in all of our e-mails being blocked.
However, “bad user” or “bad host” notifications are not always accurately labeled. Over time, we’ve learned that these messages are often sent when temporary hardware failures occur somewhere between us and the member. It also occurs when all of our e-mail has been blocked by a particular ISP. When the latter situation is detected, we attempt to contact the ISP to resolve the issue. Most ISP’s are very willing to correct the problem. For instance, we have successfully resolved problems with AOL.com and bellsouth.net. However, ISP’s like kw.com will not cooperate with us.
With the current spam epidemic, most ISP’s have automated programs that attempt to detect abusive e-mail. Unfortunately, this often results in good e-mails being blocked as well. We can correct this by having our IP addresses (which currently range from 209.192.103.0 to 209.192.103.255) and our e-mail suffixes (buyersusa.com and buyersusarelocation.com) placed on the ISP’s white list. If we see that there is a problem with a large ISP, this is our first solution. However, it is impossible to do this with each of the thousands of ISP’s in existence. Therefore, we ask that the member work on this issue with their ISP.
ISP server verification also causes problems. When certain ISP’s receive a large volume of e-mails from the same sender, they often try to ping the server to verify that it exists. When an ISP does this for every e-mail sent, it triggers our own firewall (which is set to protect us from abusive traffic like this so that our servers don’t crash). AOL.com used to do this until we were placed on their “white list”. However, it is still a problem with yahoo.com, which pings us constantly. This results in our server “blacklisting” yahoo.com e-mail servers for periods of time every day. This delays the receipt of yahoo.com e-mail as a general rule.
We have also noticed that some of our e-mails get misidentified as spam by popular programs such as Microsoft Outlook. This is an easy problem for members to fix. If you see our e-mails in your spam folder, simply right-click on the e-mail and add us to your Safe Senders list.
Verification programs such as found in Earthlink’s standard service often cause e-mail problems. E-mail protected by these services requires the received e-mail to be manually verified as legitimate. Unfortunately, since many of our notices go out from automated, non-monitored accounts, E-mails affected by these services are either delayed for hours or never seen by members.
The last category of problem e-mails are those that are sporadically rejected or delayed by your ISP. This causes major frustration for our members. A member will see a “bad e-mail” or “no e-mail” statement on their Member Update Data page. And, then if they test their E-mail address, there is no error. On top of this, the e-mail account that is in question is one that the member uses frequently and successfully. Therefore, the member too often quickly assumes that we have made a mistake and that we are not fulfilling our obligations to them. Let us explain what happens.
Above we discussed problems with us “blacklisting” ISP’s mail servers if they abusively ping our servers during their verification process. However, the problem is much more extensive than that. Some ISP’s, such as yahoo.com, have filtering policies that will delay mail from an ISP for a period of time should they suspect a group of e-mails to be spam – even if it isn’t. For instance, if we send five lead notifications to yahoo.com addresses during a given hour, starting with the sixth yahoo.com address, all e-mail to yahoo.com will not be accepted for several hours. This means that the probability of you receiving an e-mailed lead notice AFTER another member has already accepted the lead goes up dramatically.
What can you do?