A client's email account can get suspended if they are either exceeding the daily limit for number of outgoing emails, are in violation of the email service's AUP (Acceptable User Policy), or if they receive excessive amounts of incoming emails (spam).
Types of suspensions
Website owners may encounter the following types of suspensions:
Blocks
When your IP address has been added to a blacklist, it has been blocked by an ISP (Internet Service Provider) or messaging organization. It's typically possible to remove your IP address from a blocked list - some lists automatically do this after some time has passed.
Your email address may for example be blocked/blacklisted if you are receiving a lot of spam through contact forms on your website.
Blocks are less permanent than Bounces. It is a list of refused messages that were either blocked by an ISP or deferred longer than 72 hours.
Bounces
A bounce is a message that is returned to the server that originally sent it. Bounced email is either a permanent or a temporary failure to deliver the email, based on conditions with the recipient mail server.
- Hard bounce: A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender because the recipient's address is invalid. A hard bounce might occur because the domain name doesn't exist or because the recipient is unknown. If an email is on the bounce list, Mono will automatically drop any future requests to this email address.
- Soft bounce: A soft bounce is an email message that gets as far as the recipient's email server but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. A soft bounce might occur for example because the recipient's inbox is full or the received email exceeds the incoming email size limit.
Spam reports
Spam Reports are triggered when a customer clicks the spam button or puts your email in their spam folder within their email client. Spam reports can only be gathered from Internet Service Providers that provide a Feedback loop.
It's important that spam-reported email addresses are permanently removed from your send list even if the customer has previously opted in. Continuing to send to customers that have reported your email as spam can severely affect your deliverability rating.
Spam
The simplest way to define email spam is unwanted email. Since it’s easy for a message to fall in this category, as a Sender you may want to know how and why emails can get marked as spam.
These are some of the most common reasons emails to end up in the Spam Folder and ways to avoid this:
- Improper authentication: Authentication is extremely important as it helps ISPs to identify you as a sender. Make sure your email server supports these protocols (DKIM, Domain Keys, SPF, and Sender ID) to help authentication.
- High compliant rate: If too many people are flagging your email as spam, ISPs will start sending your email to the Spam Folder. After a while, ISPs may start throttling your messages or even block them.
- Lack of an unsubscribe link: It's important to give the customers the choice to opt out of a service. By not adding an unsubscribe link to your emails, the subscriber might choose to mark your emails as spam to stop receiving the emails. Avoid this by adding an opt-out link to your emails.
- High frequency: ISPs want to make sure that their users’ mailboxes don’t get crowded and can start junking your messages. To avoid this, include a link to your Email Preference Center in your emails to let your subscribers tell you how often they want to hear from you.
- Sending to inactive users: Be aware of sending emails to inactive users as this might hurt your deliverability as ISPs have ways of monitoring activity of users. ISPs can monitor the users’ level of responsiveness or engagement. Based on these metrics, ISPs decide what folder the email will be received in.
- Inadequate content: Think about what words you're using in emails, as certain words or characters can trigger spam filters. A spam filter is trying to remove commercial advertisements and promotions. Therefore, try avoiding words that are common in such emails.
How do I lift a suspension?
The owner of an email account will not be notified directly if their account has been in violation of AUP or suspended for another reason.
If a user has been using their email account for outbound mass mailing (or other activities deemed inappropriate by the email service provider) and exceed the daily send limit, an AUP suspension will be applied and Mono will get notified about this by the email service provider. The Mono Service Team will notify you about this and inform you about which steps you and your client need to take in order for the suspension to be lifted again.
Mono is using a third-party email delivery platform to send out notification emails to website owners, for example when a contact form has been filled out. If, for instance, an internet bot fills in hundreds of contact forms on the same website, the third-party email delivery platform may blacklist the website owner's email address and stop sending emails. If this happens and your client complains to you that they are not receiving emails, please create a ticket with the Mono Service Team so we can get the email address removed from the blacklist.