Email Deliverability - Best practices? (I killed a domain)

searcher profile

April 05, 2022

by a searcher from Southern Methodist University - Edwin L. Cox School of Business in Dallas, TX, USA

Hi Searchers,

Our firm is depending on a proprietary pipeline, to find acquisition targets, that is driven by email marketing. This morning I woke up to see a domain of mine was given a death sentence, resulting in every outbound email bouncing due to "Access denied, bad outbound sender AS(42004)". Fortunately, this was not my primary domain.

I had warmed up the domain through an email warmer tool, set up authentication protocols in the DNS such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, used plain text email formats, and abided by the general email marketing rules such as no link tracking. The emails were customized with company names, company city, industry, year founded, and years in business, and kept to less than five sentences.

I am not sure what resulted in my domain going to the guillotine, but my hypothesis is that this email was not warmed up appropriately as I had only used the warmer for a month and kept it at 30 emails a day... and then proceeded to try 100 emails in a day, resulting in "unusual activity".

If anybody has any input on my practices here, I would love to hear it. This has put a halt to my marketing and, to prevent this from happening again, I am warming up an additional four domains with 100 emails a day.

Thanks for reading.

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commentor profile
Reply by a professional
from Bentley College in Miami, FL, USA
My understanding is that it's best to keep the "warm up" going for as long as you're using the domain. Meaning, don't just stop after 30-days. In the past I've gradually increased the # of e-mails that are sent. Starting from 15 and going up to 200 per day over two months. That worked pretty well previously. With that, I'm not an expert in this so I'm sure you'll have better answers from others in the community.
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Reply by a professional
from University of Southern California in North Palm Beach, FL, USA
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