The company I work for does a lot of communication with clients via e-mail. Lately we’ve had a suspiciously large number of clients complaining to us that they haven’t received the messages we’ve sent. While I’m sure a good percentage of them are lying to cover up their own failure to check their messages or act more quickly, I do get the occasional call that seems perfectly legit in this regard.
Our webpage and our e-mail address both use the extension “.biz”. I haven’t made any effort to find out how common this extension is, but thus far I’ve never encountered it anywhere else. I’m wondering if the scarcity of this extension might cause it to be targeted by spam filters.
What say the Teeming Millions?
See http://www.neulevel.biz/ and .biz - Wikipedia . Neither say how common .biz is so far, but from the descriptions I would be quite shocked if any “standard” spam filter tried to block it.
Any possibility of resending problematic messages to an external e-mail address that you have control over, in order to partially check whether they are bouncing off a spam filter somewhere? (Note I said partially - clearly you need access to the clients’ systems to fully check).
Check out the Spam Database Lookup tool on www.dnsstuff. com and see if you’re on any blacklists (scroll down past the signup info).
That’s the first thing I check if I ever get any reports of email problems with one of my clients.
If you’re on any blacklists, you should be able to find out why and how to be removed.
You didn’t say if you are part of a big company or not. There is a whole industry around email deliverability for marketing and transactional purposes. Whoever is sending the emails is being derelict in their professional duties if they are not checking the content of these emails against Spam Assasin or some simliar program to determine their spam scores. Any 3rd party vendor (which most larger companies use) should be able to tell you if any particular message hit the recipients inbox, or at least their ISP.
But his firm specializes in foreign investments.
In Nigeria.
We’re a small company (only 4 FT staff) that uses e-mail only for answering inquiries and contacting clients directly. No spam or advertising of any kind via e-mail.
We do, however, have a lot of clients oversees. Including from Nigeria. (!!!)
Our clients send us sets of documentation for analysis, and we generate a report, usually with a 2 week turnaround. But we don’t even start working on the report until we have everything we need. If a client sends us an incomplete packet, we make a good faith effort to let them know, usually via e-mail or (if no email address is listed on the application) by regular mail. Obviously we prefer written communication to spoken since it leaves a paper trail. If the missing documents e-mail or letter doesn’t get returned to us, we assume that it went where it was supposed to, and place the responsibility for following up in the client’s hands. Incomplete files are placed on hold pending response from the client. If that seems like poor customer service, consider that most (if not all) of our competitors, if given an incomplete packet, proceed with their analysis based strictly on what they have been given, and make no effort to alert the client that their report will be adversely affected by the lack of x document.
Now and then, a client who has been sent a missing documents letter calls and demands to know where their report is. We explain that the account has been placed on hold, and that we had sent them a message on x date requesting further documents. Copies of the messages (including all address info) are always kept on file, just in case. Lately, as I said before, we’ve had a growing number of clients who insist that they never got the message we sent. Most of the time, once I tell the client that I have a printed copy of the e-mail and read them the address it was sent to, all the fight goes out of their voices and they mumble a less aggressive request that I send a second copy of the message. In other cases, though, I’m left with the impression that they’re telling me the truth. In pondering this puzzle, I wondered whether spam filters might be picking up on our unusual domain extension and blocking some of our messages.
I’ve checked the Spam Database Lookup tool (thanks ZipperJJ) and it would appear that we’re not listed anywhere. Good to know. Eliminates that as a potential concern.
Possible other problems might be…
- The messages you are sending are too large - either larger than the recipient’s mail servers rules would allow or too large for their mailbox at that time.
- The attachments you send are being caught in a spam rules trap because of their extensions and being filtered out of existence.
- The content of your message is being caught in a spam trap - especially true if you are dealing with mortgages, insurance or pharmaceuticals.
If your email goes through sometimes but not always, my bet would be one of the circumstantial scenarios above. It wouldn’t be due to permanent blocking.
If you are not getting bounce or block messages from the recipient’s mail server then their server might not have the settings set to do this. On one hand it’s a courtesy to tell the sender what went wrong if something did go wrong. On the other hand it’s a huge pain and a waste of bandwidth to send those types of messages to real spammers. Unfortunately the numbers of real spammers greatly outweighs the numbers of false positives.
Have you considered putting your documents that you send online somewhere? Perhaps in a secure area on a Web site that requires a login for each customer. Then instead of dealing with the possibility of being blocked due to attachments, you can send a link.
But don’t use HTML. Just send plain text. Both links and HTML are used in spam these days, and while a link in a plain text message with no other spammy features might get through, a link embedded in an HTML document could easily trip a spamtrap the wrong way.
Do your messages have any attachments? Many corporate filters block some or all messages with attachments (where I used to work, .zip, .exe., and many movie formats as attachments would cause messages to be tossed).