Tales of Terror 2020 | Mailgun Podcast

Narrator [00:00:05] Traveling through another dimension, a dimension of cyberspace and communication, a journey into an astonishing place of perception. Next stop, the tales of terror from the email void.

Eric Trinidad [00:00:18] Hello, everybody, welcome to Email’s Not Dead. My name is Eric, and then joining me, as always, is Jonathan.

Jonathan Torres [00:00:24] Hey, what's up?

Eric Trinidad [00:00:45] Today is a very special episode of Tales of terror from the email void. It's all about that warm-up. Jonathan, man I think we get this every single day. You know, we do this every single day with our customers. And I think it’s about time we tell everybody the scary side of it.

Jonathan Torres [00:00:45] Right? Get down to the truth. Get down to the scary part.

Jonathan Torres [00:00:50] It's going to be scary.

Eric Trinidad [00:00:51] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know you don't handle the scary very well. That's OK.

Jonathan Torres [00:00:56] I don't.

Eric Trinidad [00:00:56] It's going to be very PG type scary. Not PG like Raiders of the Lost Ark PG. That's definitely scary but, like, PG like now... PG type scary like, land before time.

Jonathan Torres [00:01:08] That totally works. That completely, completely works.

[00:01:12] Well right on. Well I am a technical account manager here at Mailgun and my compadre here, Jonathan is also a technical account manager. And I guess I didn't get the memo we were supposed to dress up today. So.....

[00:01:28] No, you're good. That's a great costume. The cat ears are perfect. I just didn't do it. I don't got one at my house just lying around being able to do that kind of stuff. So next time maybe I got a whole year to work on it. So whenever we do anything again next year, I can do that. But yeah, right now, no costume. I'm sorry, but we have this spooky black and white set up we got going on there.

Eric Trinidad [00:01:49] Yeah. Thank you, Thomas. He is our producer and marketing member that is joining us. So he's going to be helping us out today here in the shadows, giving us some. Thank you. Giving us some feedback from the chat here section. And then we're going to be taking some questions here at the end. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. Jonathan, what's up sir? Like, what do we do? Like, where do we even start?

Jonathan Torres [00:02:17] The warm-up, the big warm-up? I think that's definitely one of the things that is... It's a question you like you said, it's a question that comes up every once in a while, not every once in a while, every day, it feels like. There's something new to warm up. There's something ready to warm up. There's always new things that you want to do with warm-up. So we're going to break it down as best as we can to kind of get every single aspect of the warm-up going, because there is a lot to talk about when we talk about warm-ups. It's not just one thing, it's not one simple thing. It's a lot. So. Let's jump into that. So first thing, domain vs. IP, we know there's two different types of warm-up, right? We have domain warm-up. We have IP warm-up. If you didn't know there were two things. There are two things. So, yeah.

Eric Trinidad [00:02:56] Yeah. So, like, you really don't need to warm up your domain, right? Like, as long as I can just spin up a new domain and we can just start.

Jonathan Torres [00:03:03] Yeah...cool. That's where we get the scary coming in. No, no, no, we don't want to do that. Let's first jump into that part of it. Right. Like, we want to see what parts of it that we... What can we do, what can't we do, where it all lies? So domain and IPs are two separate things, like, they should be fairly known that it is two separate things. Right. That you have a domain part of your sending, you have an IP part of your sending, but they both do need to have their own warm-up happen. Why, why, why would you need that. So for the domain, one of those things is that that domain carries reputation anywhere you send from and who you send to. And there's places that are better tracking domain reputation. There's places that are not so great at tracking domain reputation or that maybe don't track as much whenever we're looking at the information that's going on with that. So we know for sure because you even have to sign up to their tool with your domain name. And that's Google, right?

Eric Trinidad [00:04:06] Yeah.

Jonathan Torres [00:04:08] Google, 100 percent, like, they are tracking on the domain. You sign up for Google PostMaster Tools, you're doing it with the domain because the domain is what counts there and they track it very well. They track everything that's going on with it. And that's one of the things that we do see. So if you have a brand new domain that you haven't really done anything with, you've registered yesterday, you're gung ho to send out emails. If you start sending right away and you start sending right away and high volumes, that domain is probably going to be shut down, blocked. You know what we start seeing the scary things happen, right? You start getting deferrals, you start getting these blocks. You start getting all kinds of listings happening with the domain because the domain is unknown. So that is enough to be like, hey this needs a little bit of warm-up. Have you seen anything like that happen?

Eric Trinidad [00:04:49] Yeah. Yeah, no, especially with Gmail, because I think most of our customers and our clients, like, know already that Gmail is not like five percent of their list or ten percent. It's usually between, like, five and like fifty and sixty percent of their lists go to Gmail. And I like using it like as an amateur status. If this domain is immature, like, how do you... how can you trust it? I mean, I know I have a little one, so I know that I can't trust her to drive a car just because she's so immature. And it's the law, actually. So if you want to think about it. So it's all right. Yeah. Warming up is it. It should be the way it should be though. That's exactly what you have to do. It is the law for Gmail if you want to get through to them and to their customers and to your clients that are signed up with them, you have to warm up. You have to build that rep. So absolutely. One hundred ten percent.

Jonathan Torres [00:05:47] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's one of those things and I mean, you know, so already I'm going to answer one of the questions that's in the chat because it's already there and I feel like we need to dive into some of that. But high volume, what is high volume mean when you're, whenever you're doing... sending so high volume, it really doesn't mean a whole lot. There's a threshold, really, that providers will track at. Right. So we know because of Google Postmaster Tools, because of Microsoft SNDS, because of the other tools that are out there doing one hundred messages a day to each one of those providers already makes you a high volume sender because that's enough for them to track that domain and see what's going on. If you send spikey traffic or by spikey, I mean every once in a while you do some higher volume and, then, maybe days of not doing it. It doesn't make you not a high volume sender, IT just means that you're only going to hit those times within certain time periods. Things like Google PostMaster Tools will show you that information just on those days you hit those higher volumes, those hundred messages or more for their location. But it does mean that at one of those points, you will be tracked for that coming through because you are sending enough to hit on that radar and it's enough for them to say, hey, maybe we should pay attention to this traffic that's coming through. So it doesn't take very much, but that's a lot. That's enough to get it there. And yes. Like that domain Google specifically. Yes. But every day we know that other providers are getting better and better and better tracking that stuff. So don't let Eric's kid drive. Your car is basically what we're saying.

Eric Trinidad [00:07:15] Yes, she needs to get mature. That maturity rate, you know, we need to get that up, you know, so she's able to drive successfully.

Jonathan Torres [00:07:22] Yes. Awesome. We'll cool. Then we'll move on to the IP. So the IP is one of those things that we see everybody track. Right? If you go on to Google postmaster tools, you can definitely see that they're doing the IP there. If we go on to SNDS, they're tracking by the IP. That's how you pull up the information for them. So we know it's significant. We know that's one of those things that happens. Right. So we just want to make sure that we're also doing it there. And I don't know, have you, like... what are the biggest consequences of what you've seen?

Eric Trinidad [00:07:50] A pretty much the same as just like throttling heavy throttle, you know, gray listing. Come back later. You know, that's probably like the biggest thing that I've seen. And then if you keep like if you keep trying to send you kind of go through, you're ultimately going to get blocked as well. You know, just you've got to take those throttling as just like early warning signs and like the canary in your cage. Man, we're using a whole lot of, like, examples here. But, you know, that helps us really kind of break it down and help others understand like these temporary failures. And those are your early warning signs. You know email service providers they're telling us, they're telling you exactly what it is that you're doing wrong. And if you don't listen, it's going to have some bad consequences.

Jonathan Torres [00:08:36] Yeah, yeah. No, definitely it can. And I love that you say that. I don't know why you would go kind of morbid with canary in the coal mine kind of thing. You just said that. And that's definitely a warning sign of death coming, so.

Eric Trinidad [00:08:49] Well, I'm trying to keep it spooky, you know.

Jonathan Torres [00:08:52] Those cat ears help out so much. So that's awesome. Yeah, exactly. That isn't necessarily instant death, right? If you don't do all the warm-up plan, if you don't do some kind of warm-up on the domain, on the IPs, it doesn't mean instant death, but it does make your track or getting on track a lot more difficult because that's the very first thing that happens. Right. It's the very first thing that somebody sees. Microsoft doesn't know who you are. Microsoft isn't keeping up with the email world or any kind of pop culture industries, or I mean anything really. Right. Like we can expect Microsoft to just like, hey, like this person has a website and a legit store and they've never sent email before. But yeah, we know who they are like, that's not the way it works. Microsoft, Google, VMG, Verizon Media Group, sorry. They don't know who you are as a sender. They only care so much. They only care so much about that. Right. Look, it's going to be a little piece of it. You know, establishing a domain, registering a website or a domain itself, really registering that months before you ever stand with it. That's important. And it means something. And there's a place for that. But it's also establishing the reputation, right. As a starting point of when they start seeing your traffic, when they start seeing your emails come through, and then what are they going to do with it? So we don't want to start by slamming them with everything we got. We want to build it up slowly so that they start recognizing who we are. We start building reputation and we kind of get going from there. So we kind of go in when, right? When this continues on. When we start doing the warm up. When is this appropriate to do and then what do we do? So I know we already got another question for that. So consistently warming up IPs ish? There's different levels to it. So let's go ahead and put down the situations because I think that's kind of important. So when do we start? But when do we first consider warm-up, brand new domain, brand new IP, super simple. Right. Like it's... it makes sense in that situation. Where did that list come from? How you're sending to it, like it's just maybe you've never sent out an email before and you've built up this customer list, that's from years and years and years. Well, that can cause problems if you don't warm up correctly. And warming up correctly means sending to your most engaged people, people that come back to your store fairly often, especially if it's like a web store, you know that they're going to be active. They're active within your storefront. They're active maybe in other ways that they're communicating with you. But now you want to start sending a newsletter. You have the permission to send them. Great send to those active people first, send slowly first, and then we'll start building that up. So, yeah, that's a unique scenario. Then we also have times where the domain is unique and the IP is unique or new for both of those because where you've been sending, you haven't been building a reputation. Right. So there are some providers out there that will kind of throw in a group mix for sending. So if you're breaking out from that and you want to build your own reputation, you want to build your own reputation with the domain, with the IPs and really get going on your own, that's great. But more power to you that should create a very resilient domain, very resilient IP, but you've got to start correctly with it. So new domain, new IP, definitely get to that warming spot. Yeah. So you want to go with the next example.

Eric Trinidad [00:12:13] Yeah. No, I was thinking more like if you were just starting like you mostly do transactional stuff, start doing just like just receipts and now you're looking at a marketing segment. Start, you know, start warming up, then you should be segmenting that traffic out. You could go into a new domain, new subdomain or new IP for that one also. But you're still building a list, even though you've been successfully sending already. You're now, you're starting a new segment. So starting a new stream. So starting that out, starting slow, starting with those that you know that are your most engaged recipients, those that have been looking at opening and clicking those messages that you've been sending already and then slowly building out to opening that aperture into your wider breadth of customers. And then after a couple of weeks time, you know, because building that reputation does take a little bit of time. But not, it's not a crazy amount of time. You know, within a couple of weeks, you're able to send to, you know, a quarter million or a million folks just depending on them on your schedule. So, you know, you're able to pepper your... Maybe some people that you had on your list a long time ago. And then we'll talk about, like, sunset policies and what that kind of looks like later on. But yeah, first out from first starting out from go. You're most engaged. You know, these people are going to be looking for your message if stuff does get more desperate, because that could happen when you're sending out, you know, that they're going to be looking for your message, go in and rescuing it from that spam, doing its message, rescued from the spam folder and help building that reputation and be more engaged.

Jonathan Torres [00:13:48] Yeah. And then there's also the scenarios that really come into play whenever you're doing changes. Right. So you kind of do that in a little bit. Right. Where you're doing transactional messages, maybe now you want to do a marketing type messages. And let's say, you know, in that scenario you might talk to somebody like me who would suggest like, hey, let's start breaking that traffic apart and then you can start doing that in different segments where you what you have you know, maybe you're sending out the same IP because there's not a ton of traffic going out of your IP. Your IP can definitely handle some of that. And we want to break it out to at least a new domain. So, new domain warmed IP, you still got to follow the warm-up plan that's going to be for domain. And again, we want you to work with somebody that's going to help you out with this. If it's somebody on our side, somebody like myself who does this, we'll take a look at a warming plan to see what it takes to warm up that new domain. Right. That unique domain, even if it's sending on an old established. I say old in a bad way. No, the established IP, something that's been there. It's been handling the workload for a little while. It's still going to require some more work for the domain. And then and then conversely, like let's say you have been doing that. You have had two domains that are doing the two different types of traffic for you. And now it's time to split that, that IP reputation. Right. We want to make the transactional part of it, the receipts, the sending that's going to be blending in the inbox every single time because we know that's something that they want. Well hey, now you want to separate those IPs? It's great. You have an established domain. You have some that are sending out, but there's still a warm-up that's going to have to happen for that IP. And in most cases that's going to be a little bit faster because different providers are tracking that in very much different ways. And you can definitely do that. Right. And you've got a warm plan. It's warm up the IP and it creates a different scenario, but it's still something that requires warm-ups. We want to be conscious of both scenarios and they both do require some of that one warm-up time to happen. And yeah, if you get that part of it right, like it is definitely, definitely, definitely helps.

Eric Trinidad [00:15:39] But once you get warm, like, is that pretty much it? Am I going to be warm forever? You know, is this something like, oh, I've already done the warm-up. Thanks, Jonathan. I appreciate your time. Don't worry about it. I'm already warm. I don't, I don't need to have this conversation.

Jonathan Torres [00:15:54] Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're good. You're good. Good. No worries, thanks. See you cap. So, and that was why it's such a good question, why do we want to be consistently warming? So there's different things that need to happen with that. Right. So I know the hot topic right now, the big topic, the big one that's looming, I think, over everybody's head is Black Friday, because Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we're talking about usually a ton of emails going out over these next few days, these next few weeks. And it's something that happens so that happens every year and something that people want to do. And us from the sending platform, we want to be able to get emails out from the recipient platform like I know there are certain places that I'm definitely signed up to spot some sales. Not like I need to buy anything else, but I'm ready for it. So, like, when those things happen, you do have to warm up and it's not a consistent thing that happens. It happens all the time and that you need to be considering it every time. But if you're not sending traffic consistently or you're going to be sending something that's very outside of what you normally send as far as volume is concerned, then yes, definitely you're going to have to warm that up a little bit. So we'll say just to get some really nice round numbers, every Friday you do a marketing campaign and every Friday you send out one hundred thousand messages where, throughout the week, maybe you're sending you a few thousand here and there that are going to be the small things that are keeping up, maybe notifications and newsletter type stuff for a certain group of people. But Friday's your big send and one hundred thousand happening every Friday. An ISP can get you to that traffic coming in. They expect that traffic coming in. Now that's established. It's been sending for a while. They know that every Friday that's going to happen. And then here comes the week before Black Friday. You're like, everybody needs to know about my sale, and you send to a million people. That is not going to go well. Like I can tell you, we've seen it so many times. It just doesn't work a lot of times because it's just something that's completely unexpected. And most of the time these ISPs, they're trying to do one thing and that's protect their users. And protecting their users sometimes means, hey, if you see a spike of traffic from an IP that doesn't normally send that much or a domain that doesn't normally send that much, we're going to block it because we don't know if that server is now compromised. If somebody got ahold of, listen, sending through stuff or maybe there's a bot on that network that's doing something funky and messing things up. So we don't want to do that. We don't want to look like that. So does it mean warming up? Yes, that means a lot of times breaking up that list as much as you can, sending it over a few different weeks, sending it over a few different days, sending it over multiple times a day so that you're not just hitting that traffic all at once. But that is definitely a time we're going to have to do an extra warm-up than what you're normally doing. Does that mean that every Friday you have to warm up to that hundred thousand? If you're not doing that every Friday? No, it does not. It definitely creates a point of resiliency. But what it does mean that something's going to happen outside of the norm. Definitely do that warmup.

Eric Trinidad [00:18:50] Yeah, we got a few questions here in the questions tab. Did you want to hit those up first or do you want to continue on real quick? I think we got one more quick section or...

Jonathan Torres [00:19:02] Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about I know we're kind of run through a lot of these topics already, but I guess a couple of things is like. The next big thing that we're talking about is that cool down, right, like if you have been sending you know, I guess it kind of goes in line with that with that same thing. Right. If you're sending falls off, sending just kind of continues on a downward trend and you try to bring it back up for whatever reason. Again, just consider that. Consider doing that. And there's times where getting around to the other part of the conversation. Right, the sun setting type of thing is that there's definitely times where maybe you clean up your list, maybe you see that you're not getting the best engagement with a segment of your sending then cool. Like, you know what? That's okay. You're going to remove those people. You're going to sunset them. Just remove the people that haven't opened anything in the last six months or, you know, maybe it's the first time you're doing a send of a certain kind and you have a list that includes customers that are 10 years old. Now, you don't know if that email address is still active 10 years later. So maybe we need to remove them and that volume comes down for what you normally do. That's okay. But when that volume comes down, we want to make sure that, you know, we're cognizant of what's happening with the domain and what's happening with the IPs because that can take a big dip. And once that big dip happens to get it back up to those numbers, it isn't just a quick like we flip the switch, especially if it's been a few weeks. The past few days have passed and it's not doing it. Not most days, but more weeks and getting it to that monthly time periods where we're, you know, if we see that slow down, when you bring it slowly, slowly back up.

Eric Trinidad [00:20:36] Yeah, we just want to remain consistent. Consistency is key and it's king and a lot of these, a lot of scenarios. So just staying on that path and making any changes don't make drastic changes. Like Jonathan was saying, they seem spammy. So, yeah, supposed to be aware and not spooky but spamming. The others for sure.

Jonathan Torres [00:21:00] Yeah. All right, cool. Yeah. I mean, that covers, I think most of the stuff that we kind of wanted to talk about. I know there are different things that are that spooky. Whoa, that's spooky.

Eric Trinidad [00:21:10] Jeez, Thomas. Come on man. Warn us a little bit brother.

Thomas Knierien [00:21:14] Someone had to do the Halloween thing, man. Yeah.

Jonathan Torres [00:21:17] Yeah, I think so. I think so.

Eric Trinidad [00:21:19] I got my ears on. Come on.

Thomas Knierien [00:21:23] I hear we're doing Q&A. So that's why I decided to sh-sh-ah-ah show up.

Jonathan Torres [00:21:33] That's perfect. Yeah, that's exactly what we want to do because I know there's a lot of questions, know there's a lot of things that people want to talk about. So, and I know we didn't cover everything, but like that's definitely you know the starting point. This is the jumping-off point. The next conversation should be with whoever you're teaming up with to do it, whether it's somebody like me. I'm just going to keep pitching it out there

Eric Trinidad [00:21:53] Someone like Jonathan, someone like me.

Thomas Knierien [00:21:56] Someone like you.

Thomas Knierien [00:22:04] Well I guess lets run through these really quick. And I think I think this is a good beneficial one for everybody. But just to clarify for Christina, how many emails do you mean by high volume? I mean, just to reiterate.

Jonathan Torres [00:22:14] Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it's hard to set a hard number just how much you're doing. But I would consider if you're doing anything more than like 10K a week, like that's enough already that you're going to be on there, especially if it's from a unique domain that you're using as your DKIM signature domain, something that's being tracked out there. So take a look at that. That information, if you don't know, most of the time you can look at the return path of your emails. Once you receive the email, you can look at the return address. If it is your domain, that's signing that's your reputation that's on the line. So you want to make sure that's what you're... if you're at those volumes, check that out, make sure that it's warmed up or that you are warming up if you're doing that kind of sending

Thomas Knierien [00:22:57] And then on the other end of the spectrum. So like, what is low? Like amount by day and hour?.

Jonathan Torres [00:23:03] As low, as low as like not going to be tracked or.

Eric Trinidad [00:23:09] Well, something like some of the tracking tools, I guess like SNDS and Google postmaster tools like for us to get feedback in there, I think the minimum is like a thousand a day consistently for us to start getting feedback on that. So I guess less than that would be considered low.

Jonathan Torres [00:23:23] Yes. Yeah, it's likely not going to be tracked right through.

Thomas Knierien [00:23:29] Okay, so here's one for Mia. Is it necessary to warm up new subdomains as well?

Jonathan Torres [00:23:34] Yes, yes, yes, so go ahead, Eric, I'll let you do that one.

Eric Trinidad [00:23:38] No. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's essentially it's a new endpoint that you're coming from a new domain. It's in your building, essentially that reputation the same. So because it is a new point of reference, it's definitely going to need to be warmed up as well. So.

Thomas Knierien [00:23:55] Nice, nice. This one comes up from Robert. Is it helpful to have users add the email address to the users’ address book? I've heard that one a lot actually.

Eric Trinidad [00:24:04] Yeah, absolutely. A lot of those little things are tracked like with Gmail, you know, all those little quirks and nuances that you do with the messages are definitely tracked. Engagement, moving the messages to specific folders, adding users to their address book. Yes. One hundred and ten percent. That's going to be helpful.

Jonathan Torres [00:24:23] Yeah. And definitely even for the fact that if you do that, if you asked them to do that, if you just let them know where your emails are coming from and where to expect those emails from them, they are doing exactly that. They're expecting those emails if they add it to the address book most of the time. What that does in a lot of platforms is basically safe lists your sending address, which is great because that means that email will be a lot more resilient to going in the spam filter. It's going to land in the inbox more often and then it creates an engagement piece, which is exactly what the providers care about. Right? That's exactly from Microsoft to Google to Verizon Media Group. Like all of them care about that piece that you're looking at that mail or that your recipients are looking at that piece of mail and that's what counts.

Thomas Knierien [00:25:04] Looks like we've got another one from Alex. If I have 50K of emails, what will be the correct way to warm up that 50k of emails?

Eric Trinidad [00:25:13] Think it's going to be the same way, like we still got to keep targeting, start low volume, warming up every day, being consistent on your sends and then listening to that feedback, if you're getting throttling, you know, maybe staying there at that same rate that you're sending or throttle back. Sometimes it's, you know, sometimes you gotta take a step back, a step back to move forward. It's just paying attention to the feedback that you're getting for those things.

Jonathan Torres [00:25:44] And a lot of it comes down to consistency as well. Right. So most of the time, we're talking about starting with very low numbers and then building that up. And it really depends on how robust your software is or the platform that you're using right. From the Mailgun side we definitely have tools that you can use to really start scheduling things out. So they deliver in a certain way. But you have to be able to send us those things to do that. Otherwise, if you just send us like 500 emails, we'll deliver 500emails for you. Like we're on it, we're set, we're ready. But most of the time, if we're doing that kind of stuff and we're doing a warm-up, we want to do that a lot slower. Right. So we don't want five hundred emails to go all at once. We want to do one hundred emails an hour for five hours. And so if you have the capability of doing that, that's exactly what we want to do. Right. We want to start off pacing it out and then being consistent with that. So if we start sending today, what is it, Tuesday? Right, Tuesday. 1:00 p.m. Central Time, and we start sending for five hours, then we should tomorrow if we're increasing that amount of traffic and sending out again then again from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Central Time or 6:00 p.m. Central Time, we want to send out more traffic, but still within that same time frame, staying consistent if we're going to be sending every day. And that's if. Right. That consistency is the key. If we're only going to be sending out Tuesdays, you don't want to force the warm-up to happen like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then all of a sudden you just cut off to only Tuesdays and you start going through the roof with your volume. It's going to make things a little bit more difficult. It's going to look a little funny that things are changing so much. So we want to make sure that we're doing it right. But yes, always start off slow, spread it out as much as you can. That's just going to help everybody along the way to you, right? The ISP will help filter some of that traffic down to be able to deliver to them, to the recipients. And then you're going to see that slowly, slowly build up. So we want to make sure we go consistent, consistent, consistent.

Thomas Knierien [00:27:32] It looks like we've got a question from Chris, so for the Black Friday example from earlier, right, you'd want to send a pre-Black Friday email slowly over a few days to a week so you can blast out the actual Black Friday email, the day of or before?

Jonathan Torres [00:27:48] So we want to do it. So it really depends on when you need to get that message out. Right. So, like, if it is going to go on Black Friday, the difficult thing is, is that you can't just do the Black Friday send on Black Friday or the day before like that. That's one of the things that is as much as we would like to, I mean, platforms are set up to do that, right? Like, if somebody chooses to do that through mail gun on Black Friday, like, we will do our best, like we already have, like servers set up and ready to go to do that kind of stuff and be able to get at a technological standpoint, send that out. But it really comes down to what the best practice is. Right. So, like, if you're sending to a list that's way, way bigger than what you normally send and what you normally send on a Friday or even at any point in the month, then when those ISPs see that message and see that high volume, it's going to be problematic. And that's what it really comes down to. Right. So as much as we want to send it all on this date, sometimes it really means, is breaking that list apart and breaking it, breaking it down, like, maybe hit some of the people up before. Right. Maybe you have a few that are kind of semi engaging and do it, maybe send them the week before and let them know that, hey, look, this is the Black Friday sales are going to be coming up. And maybe if they open that, then maybe you can add them to the list, but maybe send them a couple of days before. And that's where you can start building that list slowly coming up to the actual day. But you just don't want to go full-on that day because then it can be problematic.

Eric Trinidad [00:29:10] You know, a lot of people are going to be doing the same for sure.

Thomas Knierien [00:29:13] Mm-hmm. This is a good one. What are your favorite tools for email domain health?

Eric Trinidad [00:29:21] Oh, we use a lot

Thomas Knierien [00:29:24] Yeah, y'all do. Y'all use a lot.

Jonathan Torres [00:29:28] I think when it comes just strictly to domain, the one that we rely on, just because it's usually a big part of everybody's list, you've got to consider how much of your list is going here to decide if this is the one that you want to use. But the one that I always recommend is Google Postmaster Tools, just because they're so good at it. Usually if they're seeing your email a certain way than most other providers are going to see it about the same way. So that's the one that we like. Go straight to the source and see what they're telling you about that.

Eric Trinidad [00:29:53] Yeah, and it's one hundred percent free, which is always good. So you just get to sign up and you know, as long as you're hitting those metrics that they require, like at least a thousand messages a day, then you should be seeing some feedback on those sends for your domain, for IP reputation, for spam hits, all that fun stuff or spam percentages.

Thomas Knierien [00:30:14] Yeah, nice. All right. We've got just a few more guys, and then we've got to let our host go. But it looks like we got one from Jesse. What is the best way to deal with soft bounces?

Eric Trinidad [00:30:28] Well, I guess determining what those soft bounces are, you know, is it because. Because they do tell you a lot. They tell you, hey, we can't find this recipient or hey, your domain or IP doesn't have the correct reputation just yet or you come back later. We've seen even stuff like that. Hey, grab a glass of wine. We'll be here while, you know, it really kind of depends. So it's really just depending on whatever that that information is taking back and just applying it to your send, if it's they can't find a user or the user's not in the data table or something like that, you know, just reviewing the list and making sure that, oh, did they misspelled Gmail or Gmall, as we see, or Yahoo.con. You know, that happens a bunch, you know, validating your list and making sure it's good.

Jonathan Torres [00:31:17] Yeah, actually, I was going to take it from your own words, Eric. You know, a lot of times what we'll see is those deferrals, those temporary bounces of temporary failures. They will be something that is a warning sign, something that says like, hey, you're doing something incorrectly. Something's going on. And a lot of times it just means slow down, right. Most of the time that it means like, hey, slow down. Make sure that you're sending to engage people, make sure that there isn't any bad addresses on your list, like you just mentioned. You know, cleaning some of those up is going to be super, super helpful. But then also really making a conscious effort to just not blast so many emails out. Like sometimes it is just going to be a temporary thing. I know this is one of those things that we've just seen happen. Yahoo will tend to defer messages, like, fairly quickly because they don't know who you are as the sender, you know. So we'll get a lot of those temporaries happening right away because you're hitting them at volume and they don't know who you are. It is. They just want to know you, let them love you.

Eric Trinidad [00:32:13] We know you're good people. We know you're good people.

Jonathan Torres [00:32:17] So you've got to get that. So like, yeah, it is. If you're seeing those, just slow down a little bit. One of my suggestions is always like if you start seeing a lot of those with Yahoo, it doesn't mean that they hate you or they don't want you. It just means they haven't established anything for you yet. So slow down a little bit, slow down that warm-up process sometimes instead of increasing day over day, like slow down for a few days and don't increase like send some consistency there. And then you can keep going because it'll help get through as long as what you're saying is good in email. Like it'll get there. Yeah.

Thomas Knierien [00:32:46] Awesome. All right. This is the last one. Okay, this is from Jorge. So I get it for commercial campaigns, also marketing campaigns. But how do you warm up a transactional system that only sends mails in response to a transaction? Mails cannot be retained or hold a schedule. So pertaining transactional messaging.

Jonathan Torres [00:33:06] Yeah, that's a great question and I think the biggest thing there and the biggest variable that I know is not part of the question, but it's what you need to consider and that's it. Why is the reason for the warm-up? Right. So if you've had a web store, then unless people are just bombarding you all of a sudden within the website because there's a new web store with a new domain or at least sending domain that's going to be doing that, that might be the one outlier that is really, really difficult to solve for. And you really should talk to somebody about what those variables are. Right. Otherwise, if you're just moving from one ISP to another, how much volume is that going to be? How much volume are you taking on every hour, every day? Because most of the time with transactional traffic, it's going to be a load of volume that it'll do almost an organic warm-up because those messages for that exact reason, right. They're not going out all at once. They're not hitting any ISP with a thousand messages every minute. You're hitting them with a few hundred an hour. And that's exactly what most warm-up plans look like. So usually switching over, flipping the switch, is going to be okay in those scenarios. But you really, really have to look at that volume as a variable. If you go over a certain amount, then it's probably gonna be problematic. But at that point, you're more than likely going to be wanting to do a couple of IPs or something else to help balance that out. Right. And there's different things in different scenarios that can help out with that. But again, it's hard to answer that question without all the variables around that. So, but, consider that right. How much volume are you sending? And then the fact that most of the time those smaller volumes an hour are exactly what you want. Yep.

Thomas Knierien [00:34:36]  Cool, cool. Well, that concludes the answering questions with Jason Voorhees, guys. I'll see you later.

Eric Trinidad [00:34:44] All right. Oh, man. And he's out in a puff of smoke. Right on. Well, everybody, thank you so much. I really appreciate you all hanging out with us today. Continue looking for us. You know, we're going to bring more episodes of Email's Not Dead out. Jonathan, thank you for your time today. I know we got to jet here, but thank you again for all your questions. So much thanks. Stay safe, everybody. Look for us wherever you listen to a podcast and you have a great and safe rest of your week. Thanks.