office autopilot email deliverability?

Hey Welly,

While I can't directly answer your question since I'm not an Office Autopilot customer I can give you some insight into our sending infrastructure and practices.

I'm Brendan Dubbels, the Email Delivery Lead her at Office Autopilot. Delivery is a pretty major concern for most customers who are coming over to us, that being said the delivery responsibility lies not only with the ESP but with the individual sender as well. We have many practices and standards set in place to ensure that our public pool of IPs delivery rates remain healthy and provide a clearing for 100% inbox placement.

We setup the infrastructure up to (and in many cases exceed) industry standards so every message that leaves our system is signed with DKIM, domain keys, and proper SPF records. Due to the route that ESPS are taking (Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo are the leaders here) a solid infrastructure just isn't enough. Most major ESPs have implemented (and if they haven't they are working on) an engagement judgment system so list hygiene is really coming into play. Having things like active re engagement campaigns (auto re engage anyone who hasn't clicked or opened in x months), high value conversational content (if you get users to reply to your messages their ESP will see that, you'll also be added to the address book which is a personal form of whitelisting), and double opt in are all huge factors in your messages delivery.

On top of the challenges being faced with engagement and list hygiene is content. While there is no single way to have messages pass content filters there are many things that one can do to help ensure succseful (and timely) message delivery. Firstly do not use public URL shorteners, by using a URL shortener you are linking yourself in with the reputation of millions of other users (bit.ly, owl.ly, tinyurl, etc). Spammers frequently use these services to hide links that go to scam sites thus the ESPs now have a very small tolerance for bulk messages with URL shorteners in the body. Secondly, keep things consistent! If it looks like spam (many different colors of text, different sizes, random bolding, purposeful misspellings of words) your likelihood of reaching the inbox unscathed is greatly decreased. There are rules built into the ESPs filtration systems to look for these things, including Spam Assassin, the leading open source spam filtration system. Lastly, ensure you have a solid image to text ratio I suggest 20% images at most and atleast 80% text), if your Email consists mostly of an image you are likely to be blocked, this is a method many spammers used to by pass content filters, since the spam checkers cannot check what an image says.

One of the things we do to ensure solid reputation is monitor messages leaving our system, we hold all customers to a maximum .4% complaint rate and 7% hard bounce rate. We are always working on implementing new features and updating existing ones such as active content spam scoring, grey listing of poor lists, and a filter for our importing system. Each of these features and processes safegaurd our sending reputation. Please let me know if you have any additional questions, I'd be glad to help.

I've included my direct line below, if you have any other questions about Email delivery with us (or just Email delivery in general) give me a call, I'd be glad to help.

Regards,
Brendan Dubbels
1-888-767-7429 x 104