Inbox Equation - The Science of High Email Delivery and Inbox Placement

Email david@davidfavor.com with information about the problem you’re trying to solve. We’ll go from there.

1980 - I wrote my first lines of code. Mostly custom machine code for testing Boeing Avionics modules…​ the electronics that keeps airplanes in the air.

Then an oddity occurred. One of the guys I worked with had gotten a Mag Tape (big magnetic, reel to reel tape) of something call UNIX with a "C" compiler. An old PHP-11 became the home of this UNIX thing, which we all played with.

I was hooked.

1993 - CERN (European Nuclear Research Center and Large Hadron Collider) released it’s Web server and Web browser code into the public domain.

1994 - I got one of the first ISDN lines in Austin, TX run to my house. This gave me 1x static IP address.

I purchased a stack of 3.5" hard floppies containing Linux. Spun up my first Linux system running in a spare bedroom, then went to work running Web servers and Mail servers.

I’ve been in business running online projects ever since.

1994 - Also the year of my first contact with Dan Kennedy, who provided me the practical knowledge to easily monetize my tech experience.

Dan and Linus (Original Linux Developer) top my gratitude list.

2005 - Wrapped up a 10 year contract with IBM working as on a Tech SWAT team related to the HACMP project. The interesting part of this work was the tech had to do with targeting near 100% uptime, so I learned a lot. Also, many HACMP clients had SLAs (Service Level Agreements) where IBM paid these clients $25,000/hour for any downtime caused by IBM related problems.

Today, I provide Fractional CTO services for many projects. Clients pay a monthly retainer for a block of hours, so they have access to my expertise without paying me a high six figure, yearly salary.

This gives them access to me, along with access to my infrastructure of high speed, high traffic Web servers and an array of Email Delivery Tech which can work with existing email services, or my own custom, in-house MTA (Mail Transport Agent) mail sending system.

This page provides a walk through of actions you can take to get your mail delivered (accepted by Mailbox Providers), then a high chance of landing in a recipients Inbox.

Today online and offline technology are tightly intertwined.

Part of these actions can be implemented by you or your in-house tech team.

Other actions, are best handled by your CTO, who understands how your entire business works - online/offline marketing, Web content, Email content, everything end-to-end.

Normally new clients come to me when they’ve suffered some catastrophic technical failure. These failures range from $1000s/week to one client with an estimated loss of nearly $200M due to flakey $9000/month Hosting which died under traffic load.

Almost always these problems could have been avoided, and fortunes saved, with a little testing and measuring.

Do yourself a favor.

Designing your next $1,000,000/month project…​

You know you have a high chance of success…​

If you cry yourself to sleep every night because of the egregious retainer you pay your CTO.

And your CTO is a constant thorn in your side about testing, measuring, security…​ all things leading to sustained cashflow increases…​ forever…​

This is very important.

If your email deliverability goes to zero.

You must stop mailing immediately. Do not say to yourself, of my offer must be bad or something with my ESP (Email Service Provider) must have gone wrong.

Low deliverability is a first indication blacklisting is coming soon.

Anytime you have a mail send problem, hire someone to help you.

The following are the primary DNS Email records required for ensuring high email deliverability.

These records also determine, technically, whether email has a chance of Inboxing or will end up SPAM, then eventually end up adding your IPs/Domains to RBLs (Realtime Blacklists).

Once you’re RBL’ed, you’re out of business till you hire someone to help you recover.

Most people have no DMARC record setup or if it is setup, the DMARC record is incorrect for Inboxing.

If you send email, having no DMARC record or an incorrect DMARC record, this like pulling the wire out of your dashboard oil gauge or hiding your head in the sand like an Ostrich.

Hiding a problem is no solution. With

We’ll book a call to talk about your specific situation to determine if we’re a good fit together.

In our story’s context, ESP (Email Service Provider) means - any system initiating email, including…​

All ESPs I’ve tested, at some point, have various types of breakage.

Sometimes this breakage lasts a few days, sometimes months, occasionally breakage lasts for years, so I class this as persistent, with no expected fix ever coming.

Breakage may relate to SPF, DKIM, DMARC, or incorrectly processing of Mailbox Provider (Gmail, Yahoo, etc…​) return codes when messages are submitted to a Mailbox Provider for delivery to one of their users.

We’ll cover how to fix all these.

This is one of many lost fortunes I’ve seen over the years which occur because of some minor technological glitch.

If you’re serious about maximizing your conversions and cashflow, you must invest as much in your tech as your core business.

What follows is one of these many stories and the fixes to avoid this problem in your business.

Recently I took on a new Fractional CTO client.

When I take on new clients, 2x technologies are effected.

This story relates to…​

Email Deliverability Tracking which occurs by receiving DMARC reports, then in realtime analyzing these reports, then instantly patching SPF blocks to fix broken ESP (Email Service Providers).

DMARC reports contain detail about every IP sending mail on behalf of a domain, along with whether SPF and DKIM passed or failed.

This story relates to client yearly mailing sent to leads prepared over the last year to purchase an $8,000 product which showed…​

This fails to account for additional lost lifetime revenue associated with lost IP/domain reputation for all these lost email.

To me, this level of lost revenue is unacceptable, especially because this loss occurred due to a CRM system’s SPF record breakage.

In this case, the problem was sending IPs missing from an SPF block provided by a large CRM firm.

This means, this client did everything right. The CRM sending mail dropped the ball. My client lost $1,840,000 with no recourse.

Here’s how you can fix this…​

This one will be hard for most site owner to swallow, because so many Email Consultants thoroughly misunderstand how to correctly setup a site’s DMARC Policy.

Take this DMARC record, for example…​

Here’s what this means…​

We’ll focus here on the policy, which can be - none, quarantine, reject - for both the site policy (sp) and subdomain policy (sp), where a site might be foo.com, with mail.foo.com as a subhost.

Mailbox Providers determine how to handle mail being received which fails SPF authorization or DKIM verification, based on DMARC policy settings.

SPF records are very simple to understand.

If an IP exists in the SPF record for a site, then the IP is authorized to send mail for the site. If the IP is missing from the SPF record, mail sent is at best SPAM, at worst Malware/Phishing/Evilness.

Here’s an SPF record…​

SPF records authorize a set of IPs to send mail for a giving domain, so the above TXT record authorizes mail from foo.com, SendGrid, Aweber, InfusionSoft.

In this example if foo.com adds many IPs, then starts sending from these IPs without adding them to the SPF block (include:foo.com), all mail from these IPs is Malware/Phishing/Evilness…​ well…​ maybe, maybe not, but if your Gmail or Yahoo, you’re not taking any chances so these IPs will at first be throttled, next blacklisted internally, then blacklisted globally, then you’re bankrupt.

Realtime SPF patching is easy to understand also.

Every time a DMARC report arrives, the report is parsed, then the IP is tested to determine if this is a Valid Failure (truly forged or hacked email) or a Broken ESP Failure. In the 2nd case, a custom SPF record for site is modified to immediately include the missing IP block.

The longer DMARC reports are generated for a site, the more corrected the SPF record, resulting in IP/site reputation and deliverability.

This one is very tough, as there is no fix.

DKIM signing occurs inside each ESP MTA system, so if DKIM signing is broken, there’s no fixing the problem.

In your DMARC reports, if you see 100% SPF pass along with 100% DKIM fail, the you must do the following or your site reputation will be lost, maybe for a very long time.

Other breakage occurs which is beyond the scope of this discussion.

Company principles are served to research…​

There are others. The list expands every day.

Best for your CTO to stay on top of tech, rolling in fixes as required for your specific business model.