How not to become an honest mailer

It has long been hosted on one resource that had the service "mailing lists". For those who are not in the know, download the address list (the lists are legal, no spam, Double Opt-in) and form a letter, the service automatically sends a letter to all recipients. Actually, everything was fine, except for one thing - statistics. I wanted to know how much was delivered, how much was read, etc. etc.

I started to understand. The Big Three (Mail.ru, Yandex and Google) have special services for analyzing such statistics. And again, if Yandex and Google identify such mailings by SPF (for Google you still need to add headers in the letter, for Yandex you don’t need anything at all), then Mail.ru has distinguished itself (and more than once, actually about it and the post) - only DKIM !

For everything to work, you need SPF, DKIM and DMARC (to complete the picture). Since SPF and DMARC are easily implemented through DNS records, then DKIM is far from universal. If the hoster is not a goon, and does not ask for an additional fee, like some well-known hosters.

I went over and found a host that supports SPF, DKIM and DMARC and does not ask for extra money (by the way, cheaper than my current host, which did not provide such services).

So let's go. Since he did not have “mailing lists”, he had to “saw through” his own program.

The first puncture. If Yandex and Google do not impose restrictions on the incoming stream from one server, then Mail.ru, on the contrary, immediately bans, returning a 5xx code error. There is a certain magic number, after which they start to “hack” you; it was not possible to achieve specific values ​​from Mail.ru technical support. Google did not respond to the request at all, and Yandex replied that there were no such restrictions at all.

Since it is beyond my control to create a server grouping under the standard tariff, I introduced a delay between sendings to Mail.ru domains (bk, list, etc.). Things have gone.

Here is the second puncture. In Mail.ru there is such a parameter as "Reputation"

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The smaller it is, the better. As the manual says, the smaller it is, the less likely it is that your message will be spammed or rejected altogether. So this is not true - Mail.ru itself ignores this parameter. Look at large parameters of reputation, all letters fall into the inbox (January, February), and with smaller parameters, on the contrary, some fall into spam (March).

The third puncture is the Trend parameter. This parameter should show the trend of the “Reputation” parameter, but it shows the wind in the apartment.

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Do not try to understand its logic. This parameter rises and falls depending on the distance of a thousand comets from the Earth. It shows an increase of 150%, but the next day the parameter is in the same place and vice versa. To understand the “bursts” of the number of letters, these are the days when there was really a mailing, the rest of the days it is a normal working correspondence (yes there are really so few letters, but only to Mail.ru servers).

Fourth puncture. Periodically, in the column "Complaints" numbers other than zero began to appear. How is it that all recipients signed on their own, why get into SPAM? There is a plus in the karma of Mail.ru - FBL, which allows you to get the address of the user who clicked the "SPAM" button in the mail interface. I began to write (from a different address) to such users “why did you unsubscribe?”. It turned out the case in the Mail.ru mail interface.

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The user does not want to go into the letter and click on the “Unsubscribe” link (the List-Unsubscribe header is present in the letter), he simply selects the letter in the list of letters and presses the “SPAM” button! And rightly so, according to Mail.ru rules, “The subject line of the message“ Our daily newsletter from the Company ”or“ Your monthly update “Product Name” ”will help users immediately recognize your letter.” That is, if the user ceases to be interested in the topic of the mailing list, he will unambiguously identify you and send you to SPAM as no longer interested in him!

Fifth puncture. If the user did not go into the mail interface for a long time and during this time received more than one mailing, then it’s a disaster. If the user is no longer interested in your mailing list, then according to the previous “puncture”, the user selects several of your letters at once (he uniquely identifies you by subject or sender) and clicks “SPAM”. And you get in the column “Complaints” not a single letter, but a figure identical to the number of selected letters - and yet the user is one and the complaint is essentially the same.

PS You will never become an honest mailer. For the year I only managed to achieve a zero rating. Although, as experience shows, the rating does not affect anything - Mail.ru can, according to the principle of "Korean randomness", send your letters to spam.

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