Just a few days ago, I wrote that I cannot give a guarantee that an intervention on my part will get you removed from a DNSBL.1 Why? Because I won’t agree to terms that will bind me to making someone do something.
I figured I would follow up by looking at some contractual terms that your mail consultant and/or ESP will avoid. Today, I would like to review the delivery service level agreement (SLA). A delivery SLA is a contractual term stating that the ESP will guarantee a specified percentage of mail will be delivered to recipients. It stems from the uptime SLAs that ISPs and other providers regularly offer to customers doing “mission-critical” work that requires their machines to be online and accessible.
Yes, your ESP knows that your ISP guarantees 99.9999999999999% uptime. Often, though, companies think they can get an ESP to guarantee that a certain, tremendous percentage of their messages will be delivered. But remember that your ISP does not guarantee that you can reach a particular website 99.9999999999999% of the time, only that their equipment will be up so you can try. The reasons you might not be able to reach a website include many factors the ISP has no control over, such as the website’s system or the ISP being down. Similarly, ESPs can only tell you they will have their systems up to attempt it, and some do.
However, an ESP cannot guarantee that a certain percentage of emails will be delivered. There are too many other things involved to make that kind of promise. Things like:
- The receiving mail server could be broken and not receiving mail from anyone.
- An administrator could have typo’d a block/filter string.
- An undersea cable could have broken, meaning that it is impossible for the ESP’s mail server to reach the recipient’s servers on the other side of the ocean.
…And, well, you get the picture. But perhaps the most important reason is that the ESP will generally have very little control over the message you are sending. If you, the client, are not careful, your mail stream will suffer from poor delivery due to a poor reputation. As Laura points out concerning reputation:
ESPs, ISP Relations experts and delivery consultants can guide a sender through the process of repairing reputation. But the only thing that will actually improve reputation is changing sending practices.2
If you are not sending mail people want, no ESP in the world can promise your mail will get through.
Stay tuned. Next time, we’ll talk about Inbox Guarantees.
Footnotes
- Mickey Chandler, I Can’t Give You What You Want, Spamtacular (May 4, 2010), https://www.spamtacular.com/2010/05/04/i-cant-give-you-what-you-want/. ↩︎
- Laura Atkins, Reputation, Word to the Wise (May 10, 2010), https://www.wordtothewise.com/2010/05/reputation-2/. ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
