Run a couple of internet based companies. I love business and of course like to have fun.
Internet, cloud, business and stuff I find that is interesting or amusing.
While Double Opt-in may look like a headache for list growth the stats show it means you end up with a much better quality of subscribers. They open more, click more and unsubscribe less.
A smaller well engaged list means it costs less to send but provides higher returns.
Click the link above for more details from MailChimp.
Geeky MTA post alert!
I use MailChimp for my email marketing campaigns. The system is very easy to use but also extremely powerful. When I send a campaign I get a few bounce reports. This is to be completely expected. But in the case I am going to talk about this particular list contains mostly paying customers. Therefore I like to take a closer look in to why some of the emails have bounced.
Bounce Reports
Most of the bounces are easily explained and to be expected on mailing lists. Common causes are the person has left the company, the mail server was having issues (soft bounces) or the company has changed domains and not set-up any aliasing.
However I came across some interesting bounce notifications that deserve further investigation.
SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<xxx@xxx>: host ra-don.ru [96.30.9.151]: 550 SPF: 204.197.240.55 is not allowed to send mail from mcsv186.net
Final-Recipient: rfc822; [email protected]
Original-Recipient: rfc822;xxx@xxx
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Remote-MTA: dns; mail.suomicom.fi
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 79.134.108.205 is not allowed to send mail from mcsv21.net
Now the MTA techies among you can probably see from the bounce notifications what has caused the problem. But the really clever MTA techies will see what really caused the problem from the second bounce notification (hence why I only obscured part of the email address).
SPF Checking
Basically in both of these cases the email has been rejected because the sending IP failed SPF checking. So the answer must be that MailChimp has not correctly configured their SPF record. Oh my god what! MailChimp have misconfigered SPF! Well actually if you follow the guidelines of SPF they haven't. But I think they can improve deliverability even further with a simple change.
First let's analyse one of the emails. I will take this one as it is a little easier to explain
Final-Recipient: rfc822; [email protected]
Original-Recipient: rfc822;xxx@xxx
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Remote-MTA: dns; mail.suomicom.fi
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 79.134.108.205 is not allowed to send mail from mcsv21.net
We can see from this that the mail has been rejected because 79.134.108.205 is not allowed to send mail from mcsv21.net (the domain used by MailChimp). Indeed if I check the SPF string
"v=spf1 mx ptr ip4:69.20.41.82 mx:mcsv21.net include:spf.trusted-forwarder.org include:servers.mcsv.net -all"
on www.dnsstuff.com (a favourite site of mine!) the result comes back as FAIL.
But this does not mean MailChimp is sending mail from an incorrect IP.
What we need to do is check the email header a little closer.
Received: by flow.magnic.com (Postfix) id BEF0F9578029; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:07:54 +0200 (EET)
Delivered-To: xxx@xxx
Received: from mcsv21.net (mcsv21.net [69.20.41.82])
by flow.magnic.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id AAB659578028
for <xxx@xxx>; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:07:51 +0200 (EET)
This header shows us that mscv21.net (the MailChimp MTA delivered the email to flow.magnic.com MTA. Now it is not possible to see what flow.magnic.com did with the email becuase that header has not been included. However from the original bounce message we can see something interesting about the final recipient
Final-Recipient: rfc822; [email protected]
Original-Recipient: rfc822;xxx@xxx
The final recipient was not the person who was originally sent the email. Therefore flow.magnic.com has forwarded the email on to the [email protected] address. Guess what the IP for flow.magnic.com is? - 79.134.108.205 the IP that failed the SPF checks. Hallelujah!
Badly Configured MTA Forwarders
So what we have here is a badly configured MTA forwarder. The recipient should have either disabled SPF checks on the receiving server (not really possible since it is Gmail) or implemented SRS: Sender Rewriting Scheme on the forwarding MTA to maintain the SPF validation (which is what MailChimp does when it first sends your campaign to validate SPF against their domain rather than yours).
Improving Deliverability with ?all
So MailChimp have not really done anything wrong. However there is a way they could improve deliverability. I have spent many years running MTA's as a hosting provider and found what I believe to be the best and easiest solution. Use ?all instead of -all in the SPF string.
-all means if the IP does not match our SPF string then the message is not legitimate and the response is FAIL. In this case many MTA's reject the message.
?all means if the IP does not match our string then treat the message as NEUTRAL. Basically pretend it did not have any SPF string. This has the advantage of passing when the IP matches therefore improving deliverability but not causing any issues if the receiving MTA is badly configured.
For more details see SPF Record Syntax
In fact the only time I ever use -all is on domains where no mail will ever be sent.
So in summary my advice when creating your SPF string use ?all instead of -all.
I was asked by @frankbruining how I included the MailChimp sign-up form on my ServerTastic Posterous blog.
In essence I cheated a little. It is possible to add the MailChimp code provided to your Posterous blog provided you disable all the JavaScript. (I really wish @posterous would allow JavaScript - Premium option guys?).
However I wanted to include the subscriber chicklet counter to show off the fact I do have a few readers. This requires JavaScript.
Therefore I generated the HTML using the MailChimp embed form wizard. I then pasted this HTML into a file and uploaded it to my own webspace (so you will need hosting elsewhere which supports JavaScript!).
I then included the HTML file within my Posterous blog using an iframe.
To do this proceed to your site settings > Themes and select advanced (you need to get dirty with the code).
Then I simply pasted the following code where I wanted it to appear.
You will need to replace the src= with the link to the file you created.
I placed this code within the {block:ListSidebar} tags.
I recently added the Tweetmeme buttons to my Posterous blogs. If you want to add Tweetmeme to your Posterous blog then take a look here.
I wondered if it was possible to take this further and include Tweetmeme within my actual email campaigns using MailChimp. I use the RSS-to-Email system within MailChimp to send subscribers updates from the ServerTastic Blog. After a bit of research it was actually much easier than I thought.
All I had to do was add the following bit of code within the RSS tags where I wanted the Tweetmeme image to appear. You will need to replace the "source" variable with your own twitter username.
<br />I tested this in Outlook, Gmail and on the iPhone (According to my MailChimp stats this represents 71% of my subscribers).
This is a completely new experiment for me and it will be interesting to see if this generates any increase it tweets.
MailChimp is an awesome email service provider who I use extensively to send email marketing campaigns. (get $30 off via this link if you want to subscribe - yeah OK I get $30 as well!).
The new features in v5 means you can now target your subscribers by city and automate the sending of emails to a specific time within the recipients timezone. Video below for more details.
Time to publish my Supplier Christmas Wish List. This is the list of things I would like the suppliers I use most to implement/change.
Run a couple of internet based companies. I love business and of course like to have fun.
Run a couple of internet based companies. I love business and of course like to have fun.
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