Email Firewalls

By now, most email marketers know that spammy phrases like “FREE! CLICK NOW!” will trigger spam filters to flag their message. But before an email even gets to that filter, it first has to pass through a gatekeeper or "firewall." (Yep, spam is now such a problem that spam filters now need filters of their own.) Firewalls are used by ISPs, large corporations, and small businesses alike, and they all communicate with each other to help identify spam and spammers.

If IronPort’s Email Security Appliance thinks your email is spam, it’ll gobble it up and shoot its remains into cyberspace before your recipient’s spam filter even has a chance to look for the word "V1AGRA." It won’t even waste the energy to tell anybody about it (which means it won't appear on a bounce report).

But how does this server know what spam is? Your own recipients teach it. When you send an email to your list, and someone on your list thinks it’s spam—or doesn’t remember opting-in to your list, or if you never had permission in the first place—that recipient can report you to SenderBase, the world’s largest email monitoring network. If you get enough complaints, SenderBase will propagate your data to all the IronPort servers around the world, letting everyone know you’re a spammer.

Your Email Service Provider should be registered at SenderBase, so they can properly investigate every complaint generated in response to their users’ campaigns. HBJamaica’s staff receives copies of any complaints that come in, so we can disable the sender’s account and investigate immediately.

IronPort is only one of many email firewalls, gateways and security appliances. There's also:

All of these gatekeepers rely on reputation scores to block emails before they even get to the content-based spam filters. They all calculate sending reputation differently. You can make sure your reputation is good by sending clean emails to clean lists.

If you think you can send junk, get reported, then just switch to a new email server, you’re sadly mistaken. Once you get reported, your company’s name and domain name are on the lists. Gatekeepers will know to block all emails with your name in it from now on, no matter who sends it or where it comes from. This is why affiliate-marketing programs can be so risky. Imagine thousands of sloppy email senders (your affiliates) buying lists and sending emails with your company’s domain name in them. Scary.

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