Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

You know those annoying emails that pretend to be from PayPal, EBay or the local bank, asking you to login to your account and validate your password or other credentials? Those are “phishing” attacks – you’ve officially been “phished”.

According to Wikipedia:  “Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically done via email or instant messaging and directs you to enter details at a fake website that usually is almost identical to the legitimate one.

Read more about phishing on Wikipedia.org

This entry applies to anyone who will be outsourcing any of their outbound email sending from servers other than their corporate email servers.  You are likely an IT person who had landed here because someone from the marketing department said ‘Hey IT dude – we started using an ESP and we want to maximize email delivery’. 

If you are using an Emails Service Provider (ESP) like Pinpointe, Constant Contact or Exact Target, then this applies.  If you are just sending outbound emails from Outlook, then this does not apply.

What is “SPF” and what does it do?

SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework”, and helps to control forged e-mail. SPF is not directly about stopping spam – it is about giving domain owners a way to say which mail sources are legitimate for their domain and which ones aren’t. While not all spam is forged, virtually all forgeries are spam. SPF was created in 2003 to help close loopholes in email delivery systems that allow spammers to “spoof” or steal your email address to send bzillions of emails from another company’s domain (like yours). 

SPF is an open standard – it isn’t owned or controlled by any one body or company.  More information about SPF can be found at:

• http://www.openspf.org/Project_Overview
• http://old.openspf.org

Why do I want to have SPF records for my domains?

Read the rest of this entry »

Each Webinar series we run, we get questions about the difference between hard and soft bounces.

A ‘Hard‘ bounce is a permanent fatal error such as – the domain no longer exists (company went out of business), the email does not exist (the person retired / left the company / died). Most Email solutions, including Pinpointe’s on-demand email marketing, automatically process bounces and either remove them from your email list(s), or change the email status from ‘Active’ to ‘Bounced’.  Hard bounces are automatically flagged and removed from your list so that you do not ‘waste’ email credits sending to non-existent emails (doing so can also damage your email credibility).

A ‘Soft‘ bounce is an intermittent, temporary condition. For example, the recipient’s email server might be temporarily overloaded or offline; the recipient might be over their inbox quota size or there might be a temporary problem with the remote server configuration.  The most common type of ’soft’ bounce reported is ‘Blocked Due to Content’ – you guessed it – caught in a spam filter.  (Tip: Reduce Blocked Due to Content’ errors by running your online spam checker when editing your email campaign.)

Soft bounces are automatically re-tried up to 3 times over the next 4 days, per campaign. After 3 campaigns (a total of 9 retries), if an email is still undeliverable, it is then considered a hard bounce and the status in Pinpointe is changed to ‘bounced’.