And the Winner is...Yahoo!(cont.)
Utilizing an outside email service provider can help achieve greater deliverability. These providers maintain relationships with the large email domains and, thus, achieve better deliverability results. Student Horizons and our technology partner EMail Labs for instance, are able to guarantee higher deliverability rates and avoid “blacklisting” in the emails we send specifically because of the relationships we have developed with various email domains including AOL/Time Warner, Yahoo!, Microsoft (Hotmail & MSN), Earthlink, Cable and Wireless, Hurricane Electric, Roadrunner Cable Networks and Juno/Netzero. We guarantee to AOL and Yahoo! that all of our emails are “permission-based” and in return they guarantee us safe passage through the SPAM filters, but as with every mailer, we only get one shot.

Even with a pre-developed relationship, the system is not perfect and you need to be vigilant in managing your deliverability and avoiding blacklisting, even when you outsource your email to a third party. A week or so ago, for instance, we had a broadcast email we sent for a school in which all of the AOL addresses bounced. Per our agreement, AOL is to pick this up and report back the problem. In this case, the email slipped past AOL monitoring and we found out after the fact. Because we were closely monitoring the mailing and because of our relationship with AOL, however, we were able to rectify the situation quickly and resend the email to the AOL addresses.

Microsoft has structured Hotmail differently. Instead of internally controlling the filtering from the source server, Hotmail puts much of the filtering in the hands of the consumer. Hotmail users customize their own security settings in much the same way as independent SPAM filtering software. The Hotmail software includes new Sender ID technology. If a suspicious email arrives, Hotmail does not display the message. Instead it warns the user that the email appears to be fraudulent and asks the user if they want to block or allow that message and others from that sender. Therefore, Hotmail will not have the universal deliverability problems that you will experience with AOL and Yahoo!. The problems with Hotmail will be more individual and provided that you utilize an HTML code validator and a SPAM content checker, you should not have great problems with delivering to Hotmail or MSN.

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