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Ask HN: What are less-known best practices for email deliverability?
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are less-known best practices for email deliverability?
#12What is the age of your domain registration?
Re: Ask HN: What are less-known best practices for email deliverability?
#13> Excluding unengaged subscribers who have not opened an email from us in the last XXX days
How would you know if they've opened it? For example, I never allow the display of pictures (external ones, not included in the email itself via data URIs) in my email client, nor anything else that might result in a ping to a server. That's the default behavior of most email clients, isn't it?
Re: Ask HN: What are less-known best practices for email deliverability?
#14> Excluding unengaged subscribers who have not opened an email from us in the last XXX days How would you know if they've opened it? For example, I never allow the display of pictures (external ones, not included in the email itself via data URIs) in my email client, nor anything else that might result in a ping to a server. That's the default behavior of most email clients, isn't it?
I don't know if it is default or not, but it may be a setting. If HTML email is disabled or unimplemented, that would also prevent this tracking.
Re: Ask HN: What are less-known best practices for email deliverability?
#15> Excluding unengaged subscribers who have not opened an email from us in the last XXX days How would you know if they've opened it? For example, I never allow the display of pictures (external ones, not included in the email itself via data URIs) in my email client, nor anything else that might result in a ping to a server. That's the default behavior of most email clients, isn't it?
I used to subscribe to the New Yorker. I do open their newsletters and I do not have images enabled. One day they simply send me an email asking me whether I'm still reading their newsletters, telling me they'll auto-unsubscribe me unless I click a link inside the email within X days.
I find that this is an elegant solution that solves the problem completely; if a user finds your emails valuable enough, they wouldn't hesitate to click a link once every few months to reconfirm their subscription.
Re: Ask HN: What are less-known best practices for email deliverability?
#16To add my two cents: my company had the same problem - despite checking all the boxes ourselves.
When testing, something we noticed was that the content of our emails/newsletters had a significant impact on whether they ended up in the inbox vs. spam.
Of the major service providers, Outlook seems to put huge importance on the content of the email. The simple addition or deletion of a couple of words can dramatically affect spam rates.
Yahoo is less trigger-happy about content; and Gmail least of all. However, even for domains with a good sender reputation, Gmail will spam emails if the content is too 'spammy'.
Shameless plug here: we ended up building a tool to test out various email subjects/bodies against the big 3 providers above (you can even plug in your own email address/service when testing). Do try it out - I'm sure you'll find the results eye-opening: https://vetter.monsoonyeti.com/