• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, December 6, 2006

PARK CITY, UTAH--E-mail marketing might be a largely computerized endeavor, but one of its pitfalls stems from human error--typos. That's according to George Bilbrey, general manager of deliverability services for e-mail marketing company Return Path.

Speaking at MediaPost's Email Insider Summit, Bilbrey said that typos in e-mail addresses often cause Internet service providers and e-mail service providers to wrongly label marketers as spammers. If a company sends a marketing e-mail to a valid but wrong address, the recipient might then report the e-mail as spam--a black mark against the sender. Meanwhile, the marketer that sent the e-mail doesn't realize that the message was sent to the wrong address, and therefore isn't aware that the company is actually spamming people.

Overall, Bilbrey said, one out of five legitimate commercial e-mails aren't making it to the inbox, as a result of overly aggressive spam filters that wrongly characterize legitimate e-mailers as spammers. Typos aren't the only cause. "Bots" that corrupt e-mail lists by directing messages to invalid addresses also hurt marketers' reputations with service providers, Bilbrey said. In addition, marketers that rely on co-registration deals to compile e-mail addresses sometimes end up with illegitimate lists.

Charles Stiles, postmaster for AOL, added that e-mail marketers facing deliverability issues often don't have the answers to a litany of questions, including: "What domain are you sending from? What volume of e-mails are you sending from that domain? How many are reported as spam? Of the ones that are reported as spam, what e-mail address did they come from? Then, how did you come by that e-mail address? For example, was it bad co-registration? Or an old list that you revived?"

Des Cahill, CEO of reputation certification company Habeas, said another problem occurs when entities within an organization using the same domain name send spam or spam-like e-mails, dragging down the reputation of all the legitimate marketers within that domain. "Online reputation isn't just about the programs that you run, but the other mailings that go out from your corporation under your domain." Likewise, clean e-mail practices won't do much good for marketers who use affiliate marketers that also send spam for other clients.