Sending email from US based servers
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Chairman at Nett Sales LLP
19 February 2008 08:52am
Hi All,
Wonder if I can have your views on this please?
We're currently using an email sending solution that is hosted in the US (www.swiftpage.com). This means that all our emails are delivered from the US. I've not had any issues with this in the past but just recently a number of B2B campaigns have not performed as well as expected and the question was raised whether emails coming from the US may be affecting our deliverability.
We've not got SPF in place just yet but will be doing this over the next month...
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Simon
Digital and Email Marketing Consultant at Plan to Engage
20 February 2008 09:41am
Hi Simon,
I don't think you can just categorise all ESP's in the USA as being no good for sending to UK recipients - it depends more upon the actual reputation of the IP's you are sending from and whether you are authenticated or not. I personally haven't come across Swiftpage before so I can't help you there.
I do believe though if you're sending trash emails (not saying you are!) from an unauthenticated domain name, using a USA server to UK recipients then the ISP's are less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt.
However, if you're sending from an authenticated domain name, to an opt-in database with a targeted, relevant message from IP's which have good reputations - then the fact that it is being sent from a USA based server should have little impact upon the delivery.
I think the main question is whether Swiftpage supports DKIM, DK and SIDF.
AOTA has collated a list of suppliers and what authentication they support -so you may want to check this out.
Cheers
Kath
Managing Director
Ezemail
Chairman at Nett Sales LLP
20 February 2008 15:57pm
Hi Kath,
That's very useful feedback and advice - thanks. Reading the report I was somewhat confused between SIDF and SPF...
My understanding was that SPF was something I did through the DNS record of my domains to "authenticate" the IP address range of my and my ESP against my domain. Reading the AOTA report, this seems to be the same as SIDF - am I correct? In which case, how can an ESP support SIDF when it's something I do?
Thanks again,
Simon
Digital and Email Marketing Consultant at Plan to Engage
20 February 2008 16:28pm
Hi Simon,
I believe what they would be referring to here is 2 things: whether the ESP provides an authenticated subdomain for which the sender can use to send from, eg.joe@companyname.esp.com, as well as educating, assisting and encouraging SIDF authentication of the senders own subdomain name by providing the relevant IP addresses and information to enable authentication (or doing it for them if the ESP hosts the subdomain).
Cheers
Kath
Chairman at Nett Sales LLP
21 February 2008 08:16am
Got it - thanks Kath!
Simon