Good day everyone. I would appreciate it if anyone could take a look at my setup and let me know what I need to improve on. I've been in the game for around 3 months. Spent a lot of that time learning postfix/linux. I am mailing TLD at the moment. All compliant. I am in the midway stage of warming up my ips. Here are the steps I normally take when I mail: 1. Take my list of general optin/coreg, scrub it with my internal traps/unsubs, and send it through a cheap dedi with 5 ips using a generic message like "what's up how are you doing?" 2. Scrub my list of hard/soft bounces from that list. Save my openers and bots who click on invisible links. 3. Send to all the email addresses that don't bounce from a good dedi with 8 ipv4. These are the ips im warming up. I'm running a raw postfix centos 5 server right now. Rotating the 8 ips using iptables. dkim/spf/senderid/rdns/blah blah all pass. I may have left somethings out. Let me know if you need more information in order to evaluate my setup. I will be eternally greatful for ANY advice anyone can give. I have thick skin and I don't mind negative feedback or criticism. Thanks for your time whoever reads this.
I see that you're using postfix, what are you using as your front end? Also, how are you warming up your IPs? How many per hour do you send when warming them up?
You have to ask yourself, is your data source really that BAD if you have to pre-screen your list with a "Whats up, how are you doing" sacrificial email? For starters, that won't eliminate complainers as people might not be angry at seeing that, figuring it's a screw up. They will get mad however when that first piece of real spam comes in, so I don't see the purpose of this... how many hard bounces are you pulling out of your new data? Is it really that bad? I think it's time for a better data source here buddy!
Currently running Interspire sadly. Following the warmup guide here: http://www.streamsend.com/kb2/idx.p...How-to-Warm-Up-Your-Dedicated-IP-Address.html I have everything throttled and I just take the # of mails I need to send and divide by 24. I make sure I don't blast 10,000 right at the hour mark but instead is spread evenly over that hour. Thank you for taking the time to comment on my thread.
First, thanks for taking the time out of your day to help me. Bounces are roughly 15% of my data. The data is a few weeks old and I wanted to start on something cheaper before getting live data. Maybe this is a mistake? I would appreciate your thoughts on this. My reasoning behind cleaning my list is I didn't want my good IPs to have excessive bounces and affect the deliverability later on. If it isn't too much to ask I would appreciate any leads to better data sources. Thanks again for your time and help.
I think you have some concepts going, and for 3 months in, you got the basics of what you need to do, but lets work on how you're doing them. 1. Scrubbing is very important, so yes saving your good ips the problems of too many hard bounces is good. Normally you can just have it cleaned by impressionwise instead of wasting your own ips for it, you can check the cost of doing it yourself opposed to paying them to, keeping in mind they will do a better job of it, they clean a ton of mailers' data. You also seem to understand the warm up emails should not be hardcore commercial, transactional data is better for sure, but only if its real transactional content. Sending a random message like that will get more complaints than a commercial message would. So if you can find a way to send non commercial great, if you have no other content than make "softer" offers, ones less likely to get complaints (got to use your own judgement there). 2. Soft bounces are a lot different than hard bounces for segmenting, hards are most likely going to be removed, with the rare exceptions of over quota messages, temp isp errors, etc. Soft 4xx messages are the ones you pay attention to in deciding if you are sending the right way, i.e. speed, caps, and content. Obviously a 5xx ban, a tso or a blacklisting, tells you that you really went too far, and for now starting you shouldn't even be pushing near that kind of limit until you have a system to your sending. 3. Data - you do yourself no favors getting cheaper data, not that the price makes anything "good". Know where its coming from, live helps, but knowing if its really live is not always so easy, and live data from a crap coreg path is a lot different than direct opt in data, so there is a big range in what you find. So ya look for some sources and do small tests, making sure you split it all so you can see what's working. Also, don't base your send totals on how much data vs ips you have, depending on how your sending and how your ips are doing, what volume is going to be best for your ips is something you will need to watch, especially during warm up. Not sure if you know already what numbers have been working, but if you don't, send in 1k increments, not at once, but say you were starting from scratch, I'd try 1k in an hour and see the responses, then try 2k, then 3k, etc. Also following the rules for each isp. Their max and the ones you may see on here, you should be well under, don't push until you know you have a good working plan.
Thanks for taking the time to help me out. Your point on the data was good and I will definitely be switching providers. I didn't think of the 1k increments but i will definitely implement that. I've been jumping from 10k, 20k, etc which probably isn't good. Thanks again.
I think the warmup guide posted is a bit aggressive for a typical new ip. I actually send something crazy low on the first day of warming up my ips. Say 100 per ip. If you are passing the subscribers through a server to kind of scrub them, it might be an idea to instead of avoiding complaints to actually draw the complaints out. With the idea that if they survive 5 offers one a day without complaining they have a lower chance of complaining when you move them to your more permanent ips. Good luck, I believe the adage that can be applied to AOL is 'if at first you don't succeed, try try try again"
Jackal, Branding is important. Rather than sending a "hey are you there?" BS email, send your optin list an introduction newsletter using the branding in your Friendly From. Continue to use this branding as you send your offers so people immediately recognize you. Otherwise you're just going about this as an anonymous bulk mailer and your offers will be lumped in with 100 others if the data is especially bad. With regards to scrubbing data, it's important to understand even trusted sources get traps in their data, mostly because there is the occasional blackhat asshole who has NO email list, but knows how to set up scripts to send email addresses into zip submits through proxies. So these assholes will take any email list they can get (normally suppression lists) and using proxies, submit them trickle-style into dozens of offers.. and thats how co-reg lists get contaminated. The networks scrub 95% of the crap out to the asshole, who still makes $, but the suppression listed names stay in the database and get dispensed to others. All the more reason not to go with general co-reg data out there that's passed around, you're just looking for trouble. You need to find a legitimate source that preferably owns their own Advertising offer that isnt on a million networks so it isnt being contaminated by BHs and has real, genuine, legitimate data.
I never really thought of branding since I am just mailing coreg. Would it be better you think to use a company name or a personal name? I think my main problem is my data right now. Shit data = shit results. I figured I could warm up on some budget data and then search around and test out some better stuff but that doesn't seem like a great plan. Can anyone comment on the difficulty obtaining whitelisting for aol, yahoo? Should I be sending to both GI and TLD when I am warming up? It is what i'm currently doing now but I just wanted to double check. Roundabout, thanks again for you continued help & wisdom. I truly appreciate all the help I receive.
Absolutely not. The one thing I am certain of about mailing is to not mix GI and TLD's on the same IPs. Unless you are 100% certain that the GI is pristine clean (which you can't due to expiring domains), you will likely get the IPs dirty for TLD. If you examine a typical data file, at least 70% of it it is TLD and cables. Yet most of your traps will come from GI. Why take the chance on screwing up 70% of your sends with the 30% (probably only 15% in most data files) that will cause the problems. IMO - you don't even need to warm up GI IPs, just blast them. But if you want to keep IPs long term for TLD and cables, then don't mail GI on them - esp. on the warm up.
Thanks for your time and input. You make a very good point about screwing up TLD sends with GI domains.
Arby has made some really good points, I agree with all of what he has said, I want to expand on some of it tho. Percentages of majors / cables / GI is all dependant on the source, but his numbers are right based on what a real feed of data generally looks like. Here is the point(s) of warm up tho: 1. You are establishing a rep with each specific major / cable. What that means is, sending warm up email to hotmail, will warm up hotmail. It won't really help with any others, maybe in the rare / small situation of overall sender score from return path. Majors have their own scoring systems, and they take in to account sender score but mostly use their own numbers. They do report back to sender score which a lot of cables use, and so does spamassin (which is what most GI filters use). 2. GI can not be warmed up, at all. there is no rep building with it, so the IMO part of arby's post is exactly right, warming up GI is the same as straight mailing it. Pure GI mailers just push it out asap, because once you hit a trap (90% are in GI) they burn or hurt your ips. Keep the GI ips either separate, or use the ones that are starting to burn out on the majors (assuming no blacklists). You can pretty much be assured once you hit GI hard the ips will be useless for majors, unless you find a way to not get blacklisted with GI. For now, assume you will. So I would warm up majors only, slowly, soft offers or transactional email if you can find a legit way to send it to them (confirm sign ups, double opt in emails, etc). cables will warm up if you successfully warm up the majors, they don't really need much direct warm up but just don't push them too hard when an ip is new. Also make sure all your domains are aged, i.e. no less than 30 days old before you send even 1 email. Longer is even better.
But why bother? It's GI - the name of this game is volume volume volume...while you can do several things not to burn through your IPs AS FAST...there's no sense in warming up GI IMO...been mailig it for quite a while and never worried about warming up anything...
Well when I say GI I mean cable providers.. With cloudmark and other cable provider's "anti-spam" systems, warming up would reap great benefits..
Thanks for that info on GI. I've cut them out of my lists now and am focusing on TLD solely. Pushsend and Nickphx, thank you for your comments on GI warmups.
Also make sure all your domains are aged, i.e. no less than 30 days old before you send even 1 email. Longer is even better.[/QUOTE] interesting! when afc says to age domains, does he mean for Aol or Gi? Does Aging really help? Dont think i ever had a domain that didnt get used for the first 30 days and delivery has been fine, saying maybe could be better? Hmmmm. Any thoughts out there?
I'm pretty interested in an answer to aging the domain for 30 days also. With that being said do you need to host it also for those 30 days and on the IP you are going to be using? Let me know your thoughts.
