Brandon, our deliverability engineer (who I mentioned in this post), has been tinkering with my MailChimp account. His most recent experiment was to move my account to a dedicated IP address (yeah, we do that), and seek ReturnPath Certification.
Last week, when I sent my MonkeyWrench campaign, I ran an Inbox Inspection and noticed a really crazy Spam Assassin score. For those of you who don’t know, the higher the score, the more likely your email will get blocked. Look at what SenderScore did for me:
SenderScore certification got me a negative SA score. Heh.
If you’re a high volume sender who’s considering certification, here’s at least one compelling reason to look at ReturnPath.
Just in passing… I used to have Spam Assassin and when you can get it tuned it is good. I also liked you could email and get to chat with the guy who wrote it, a rarity these days (or back then, a couple of years back). I stopped bothering with it though because I never did get it quite right and I found that my ISP had a catchnearlyall spam trap that I merely had to activate. When I did, the problem went away. I’m not 100% spam free, I could still supply myself with viagra :-) but close. So unless it’s an academic consideration, I wouldn’t lose sleep over your Spam Assasin score.
Byeeeeee
BB
Thanks Bill. Spam Assassin, I think, has become more widely used as a “core” chunk of other spam filters. If you look at some of the big, sophisticated, expensive spam filters out there, you’ll find that SA is being used in some way, shape or form as part of their decision-making process. It’s useful, but I’d agree that you shouldn’t lose sleep over your SA score. If it’s above a 3, you might want to re-think something in your email imho.
I already have ReturnPath Certification from my previous self installed email server. I guess the question is it worth getting a dedicated IP and using ReturnPath?
I don’t know the pros and cons and what additional costs would be there for dedicated IP.
Someone will contact you shortly w/details on setting up a dedicated IP on MailChimp. Just so that you have that information. In terms of whether or not it’s worth getting certified, that would depend a lot on what your deliverability is right now, how much it might improve, and what each email recipient is “worth” to you. I’ve heard many e-retailers have some ROI-related dollar amount for each email address on their list, and they know their deliverability, and they can just plug in some improved deliverability number into their equation to estimate their return.
how can we -mailchimp users- benefit from this?
Nathan, very high volume customers often consider going with some sort of email certification (like ReturnPath’s) to help their deliverability. But they’re not often sure it will be worth the money. In other words, you hear a lot of rumors about how these things can improve your deliverability, but we want some more proof. So the screenshot showing a -8 score is pretty compelling. That’s the main point of writing this post. But to answer your question: if you’re a MailChimp user that sends a high volume of email, you can get a dedicated IP address from us (send an email to support, and someone will get in touch with the details). Once you have a dedicated IP address, and you’ve sent enough volume from it, you can then contact ReturnPath to seek certification.
Hi Ben,
What do you think is a good enough ‘high-volume’ for businesses to start looking at a dedicated option?
cheers
-TIm
Hi Ben,
What do you think is a good enough ‘high-volume’ for businesses to start looking at a dedicated option?
cheers
-TIm
Hi Ben,
I’m looking for more infos about spamassassin criteria. But the only doc for these criteria that I found has no reviews since 2001. Could you give me any suggestions about where I could look for more recent docs about?