Make sure you get the e-mails you want
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By
Brian Livingston
We've made some improvements in the systems that send you the Windows Secrets Newsletter. But, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, so our upgrades meant that some readers didn't receive the last issue at all! |
Simple steps to let good mail through
Last month, ActionMessage.com, the company that broadcasts our e-mail newsletter, doubled the memory of its server and moved to a new Web-hosting facility. This makes the system more responsive, which is good. But some Internet service providers (ISPs) had a funny reaction to the server's new IP (Internet Protocol) address.
Despite our best efforts to stay in the good graces of large ISPs, some rejected our newsletters simply for arriving from an IP address that hadn't been seen before.
About 12% of our 277,000 subscribers didn't receive the newsletter on July 19, due to "bounces" from ISPs. After we saw the problem and took steps to correct it, 6.5% of our subscribers still bounced on July 26. That contrasts with fewer than 0.7% bounces for every other newsletter we e-mailed in June and July.
One ISP with notable problems was RoadRunner (rr.com). Last week, more than half of the bounces affected subscribers who have rr.com e-mail addresses.
We're working overtime to make sure you receive the newsletters you've requested. But we also need you to do two or three things that we've found to be effective:
Step 1. Help your e-mail program recognize our "From" address. Place our "Editor at" address, shown below in an image, in your e-mail program's address book and any safe-senders list it uses.
All mail from us will bear this "From" address, even our personal replies when you send us a tip. If your e-mail program doesn't allow you to specify the "From" address of senders you want to receive mail from, you should consider upgrading to a more modern program.
Step 2. Whitelist our new IP addresses in your mail server. If your company administers its own mail server, ask your administrator to place the following IP addresses on the server's "whitelist." This ensures that you'll receive (a) the newsletters from our e-mail broadcast server, (b) admin messages from our Web server, and (c) personal e-mail replies from our in-house mail system, respectively:
72.9.103.50 and 72.9.103.51
216.182.80.209
64.81.169.38
These IP addresses are controlled by ActionMessage.com and WindowsSecrets.com, neither of which tolerate spammers. Your mail admin can be confident that whitelisting our IP addresses will get you only good mail.
Step 3. Resend the current newsletter to yourself. Sometimes, an ISP deletes important e-mail without even notifying you. When we find that an ISP has bounced your newsletter, we e-mail you a short text notice, using our Web server's IP address, to alert you to the problem.
If you ever miss an issue of the newsletter, you can send it to yourself again, as long as the next issue hasn't been published yet. To resend the current issue, simply use one of our links to your preferences page. Once you're there, click the "Resend" link. You can do this several times a day, if need be, to test your e-mail system until the e-mails you want get through.
It's frustrating that the spam problem has made some ISPs unreliable in transmitting basic, wanted e-mails. Rest assured that we'll do everything we can to deliver the mail to you, through snow or rain or gloom of night!
Brian Livingston is editorial director of WindowsSecrets.com and the co-author of Windows Vista Secrets and 10 other books.
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