Where, Oh Where Did My Subscribers Go??

By Donesia Muhammad Copyright (c) 2002 KDM Publishing


Not getting the amount of subscribers as you were used to getting? Thinking that it is the quality of your ezine or a bad promotion campaign?? No, that's not the reason..


Your email is bouncing and not reaching your readers. Due to new spam filters installed on ISP servers and web host servers, something as simple as using the word "Free" in the subject of your email may cause it to be blocked.


When an address bounces, you can't just automatically chalk it off as a bad address and then remove it.

First you need to know the differences between a hard bounce and a soft bounce.


HARD BOUNCES are messages that can never be delivered because either the account is not valid or there is a spam filter blocking your message.

SOFT BOUNCES are when the mail sever is having some type of problem getting the message through. They may be flooded with a lot of mail at once and when things like that happen, the server tries to send the mail a few times but eventually gives up and returns the email back to you.

A lot goes on when you hit that Send button..


As a subscriber, have you noticed lately that you are not receiving all the ezines and other email that you are subscribed
to?

There are various reasons why your email may not make it to it's destination, such as:


>> THE EMAIL MESSAGE MAY BE TOO LARGE

This can happen especially when sharing large files between people. If you have a website, it's best to let them download it directly from the site instead of sending it as an attachment.

Think about this the next time one of your friends or family members sends you a large .gif, or .jpeg picture file.

I once had a friend send me a program that was 26mb large, without realizing the consequences of this. Every time the server tried to download it into my computer it would freeze up and therefore any other mail going to that address was blocked as well. So that was my first lesson in the world of sending emails.


>> THE RECIPIENTS' MAILBOX IS FULL

When you don't check your email for a period of days or weeks, your inbox capacity will fill up very quickly and depending on the size allotted from your ISP or web host, once it's full, that's it. Until you go and clear out the messages, no other mail is going through. You ever wonder why publishers always say to please clear out your inbox. This is why.


>> THE RECIPIENT'S ADDRESS IS NOT VALID

Self explanatory. The address is either not in a correct format ( name@domain.com ) or the user name doesn't exist with that domain. This can be because this was an address used by Spammers, or just people who just enter any address to sign up to receive any type of freebies and doesn't care about anything else.

Or maybe the person just entered the address information incorrectly.

You see when it comes to determining who is valid from who isn't, it's not all black and white. There are many gray areas in determining when to remove a subscriber from your list and when to keep them.


You see more and more companies are tired of dealing with spam messages clogging up their servers and using excessive amounts of bandwidth so now they are cracking down.

This is a good thing except now we are all suffering. It is getting harder and harder for the legitimate publishers to get their message out.

So what can you do about it?

Give the bouncers a chance..

Huh, what if they are Spammers??

What I mean is most publishers wait for the same email message to bounce at least twice before removing the address, plus here is something else to consider..

Ever change web hosts?? We all know how much of a hassle that can be to set up everything again and no matter how much you prepare, your email is going to be down at least a few hours while mail is still going through and getting bounced back.

Try explaining that to the hundreds of ezines you are subscribed to?

Now should you be penalized because your email was down while waiting for the DNS change on your domain??

Cut them some slack. We are all trying to adjust..




Copyright (c) 2002 Donesia Muhammad

Donesia Muhammad is an aspiring Netpreneur. Do you Need to
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