Hi to all the Story Empire readers! P. H. here for this week’s Wednesday post with a bit of marketing news. For those with a newsletter, there were some recent major issues with one of the bigger email marketing services that you may not have noticed. MailerLite reported they were blacklisted several weeks ago and they have been working with the issue since. Here’s the scoop on what happened, what MailerLite has done and how you can keep your newsletter delivering correctly.

First of all, it’s important to remember when using larger email marketing services like Mailchimp, MailerLite and others that their reputations regarding SPAM are affected by the larger email marketers which can affect smaller ones like those of writers. Personally, I was using a smaller, author-designed service until a few months ago. It had a better SPAM reputation across the board and I had great results. Unfortunately, the service closed their email services due GDPR likely because of cost to comply with the regulations like they wanted. That change meant a switch to MailerLite for me which had a good price for the size of my subscriber list.

Overall, I’ve been pleased with MailerLite and some of the perks so I haven’t had much to say. I feel I still get a solid response and I’m doing a better job of building my subscriber list as a whole. But the recent news is a bit scary given that MailerLite is a larger service and they were blacklisted by Spamhaus.

Here’s what happened on 8/1/18 according to MailerLite:

“On the 1st of August, some of our email sending servers were blacklisted by Spamhaus. This had an impact on your campaign results because Spamhaus data is used by email providers like Outlook, Hotmail and others. In some cases, your emails might have ended up in the Spam folder.”

The service responded with these changes:

“What we know and how we are addressing it:

• Spamhaus.org claimed that our domains matched a type of snowshoe spamming pattern. Even though we’ve been operating smoothly with these domains for quite some time, their system suddenly flagged us now.
• In response, we reworked our mail server structure on Friday to solve this issue.
• We also raised our content standards even higher when accepting new accounts. Most of our current senders that were not abiding by the highest email marketing practices were put on hold.

What we will do so that this doesn’t happen again:

• We implemented a new process to ensure our structure is sound and that we are monitoring and improving its content and consistency.
• We will implement several new content checks as part of our standard procedure.
• We will continue to look for new ways to identify bad senders and questionable content during the approval process.

We have provided Spamhaus with all the necessary information and are waiting for them to remove our servers from the blacklist.”

Several weeks later, here’s the news from Mailerlite that the issue with Spamhaus was restored on 8/17/18 and why:

“We are very happy to announce that the issue with Spamhaus was resolved last Friday (August 17). Our servers are no longer on their blacklist.
The main problem stemmed from certain accounts on MailerLite who did a poor job maintaining clean subscriber lists. As a result, they hit too many spam traps while sending emails to purchased databases or old inactive email addresses. We suspended many of these accounts and asked others to clean their lists.”

Here are recommendations from Mailerlite regarding best practices for a subscriber list:

“We want to point out the importance for everyone to keep a clean subscriber list and follow best practices, such as double opt-in when building your list.
To make your life easier, we developed a special feature to help you identify inactive users and clean your subscriber list. These inactive users have not engaged with you in over 6 months, and there is a chance some of the addresses have been converted to spam traps.
Learn how to use the cleanup feature here…”

So there’s the information about the issue and I hope that the quotes help with understanding the problem. It would be beneficial to keep your list cleaned up as much as possible to avoid any email marketing service from suspending you while you clean it up.

Thanks for visiting today and I hope this has been informative. Please leave your thoughts in the comments section and I will respond as soon as I can. Oh yes, my source for the information came from informative messages received from my email provider.