The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing

Maximizing Delivery: Technical Issues

There are many technical issues that could cause delivery challenges for your email strategy. These include email authentication and sender reputation. Making changes to your technology can be challenging if you do it yourself. If you send your emails through an Email Service Provider, it may or may not address technical delivery issues. Talk to your ESP to make sure it is doing everything possible to maximize email delivery for you on a technical level.

Understanding the following technical issues allows you to discuss these issues with your service provider or decide whether you have the skills to take on the technical challenges to email delivery yourself. If you’re not technically oriented and you find yourself lost in the following sections, skip ahead to the section called “The Benefits of Sending Through an Email Service Provider” so you can determine whether your email service provider takes care of these issues for you.

EMAIL AUTHENTICATION

Email authentication allows an organization to take responsibility for a message in a way that can be validated by the recipient. It is an industry best practice that enables a receiver to validate that a message came from the sender it claims to have come from. This validation means that scams such as phishing and spoofing—which are based on forging the sender of an email—become much easier to detect. Authentication also provides ISPs and other receivers with a validated identity with which ...