Don't Send Emails through a Shared IP Address

Deliverability and reputation problems can occur if you are using a shared IP address to send out your emails while other senders use the same IP address. If the other senders emails get marked as spam or the shared IP address gets blacklisted your IP will be blacklisted and/or your emails will land in the junk folder. Many ESPs automatically use shared IP addresses across many clients.
Lead Liaison assigns a dedicated IP address to each customer. Trials are run using a shared IP address pool. Even in the pool, there are multiple IP addresses to prevent one from going down and affecting other trials.

Warm up your IP Address

If you're just starting out with Lead Liaison or your IP address has changed you will need to warm up your IP address to develop a reputation with the ISPs. If you suddenly send out 30,000 emails in one day from a new IP your messages will be limited or purposely throttled by ISPs. If you're in the thousands of emails to begin with you might avoid scrutiny. However, if bounces, spam complaints, or spam trap hits represent a high percentage of your emails sent you'll damage your reputation right out of the box. Make sure you initial sends are to very clean lists.

Use Caution with Old Database Contacts

Try not to send emails to invalid or very old contacts in your database. It's best to run some type of database cleansing tool on your database first. If you send a single message to your entire database and include these dormant contacts you could have a high percentage of bounces. Additionally, old email addresses could be spam traps. Bounces and spam traps will send a notification to the ISP and damage your reputation. The best practice is to send frequent emails to small amounts of old contacts, vs. sending to your entire database or all old contacts, and monitor results. If you're getting lots of bounces phase out this effort. Conduct this "experiment" only after establishing a good reputation.

Use Authentication

As discussed, establishing a good reputation is vital for email deliverability. To protect your reputation several methods have been developed by various consortiums. These methods verify your email messages come from an authorized server and not from a nefarious source. The solutions are DomainKeys/DKIM and Sender ID/SPF records. Each authentication method is described below.

DomainKeys/DKIM

Created by Yahoo!, DomainKeys/DKIM is an authentication scheme that signs messages based on the "from" header and a DNS (Domain Name Server) record maintained by your DNS servers. For example, if your company's domain name is registered with GoDaddy.com there's a good chance your DNS is also hosted with GoDaddy.com. To keep it simple, a DNS is a set of rules and parameters for your domain name. Since your DNS is managed by you and hosted inside a secure area (such as GoDaddy.com) it's a secure way to prove the "from" address originated from the correct mail servers.
DomainKeys/DKIM validates emails using two security keys. The keys encrypt messages before delivery and validate the message at delivery time. DKIM and DomainKeys are very similar; however, DKIM was created by several companies to enhance DomainKeys. Today, major ISPs such as Google (@gmail.com) and Yahoo! (@yahoo.com) use DKIM.
Benefits of using DomainKeys/DKIM:

• It allows the originating domain of an e-mail to be positively identified, allowing domain-based blacklists and white lists to be more effective. This is also likely to make phishing attacks easier to detect.

• It allows forged e-mail messages to be discarded on sight, either by end-user e-mail software (mail user agents), or by ISPs' mail transfer agents.

• It allows abusive domain owners to be tracked more easily.

• It allows a great reduction in abuse desk work for DKIM-enabled domains if e-mail receivers use the DKIM system to automatically drop forged e-mail messages claiming to be from that domain.

• The domain owner can then focus their abuse team energies on their own users who actually are abusing their use of that domain.

Lead Liaison uses a premier email marketing engine from Port25 which enables authentication using DomainKeys/DKIM. Lead Liaison will completely configure DomainKeys/DKIM for you. No setup is required on your part. Your Lead Liaison Revenue Success Manager will set this up.

Sender ID/SPF

Sender ID/SPF prevents other people/servers from pretending to be you. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is similar to DomainKeys/DKIM since it validates you as the sender; however, the implementation is different from DomainKeys/DKIM. SPF works by publishing what is called a "reverse MX" record to tell the

• SPF: http://www.openspf.org/http://www.openspf.org/

• Sender ID: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/

Here are a few simple rules to keep in mind when configuring your Sender ID / SPF record to work with Lead Liaison:

• If you already have your own SPF or Sender ID record set up, all you need to do is add "include: leadliaisonconnector.com" to the existing record and you're done.

• SPF clients ignore records which do not carry a recognized version such as "v=spf1".

• A domain MUST NOT return multiple records that begin with the version "v=spf1". If more than one "v=spf1" record is returned, this constitutes a syntax error and the result is "unknown".

List of ISPs and the Authentication Methods they use