It’s a simple world we live in. You hit the send button and bing ‘you have mail’. . . or someone does. So it stands to reason that if you hit send to 10,000 people they will all ‘have mail’ — bing.

But the systems that deliver mail over the internet are incredibly complex. They also are changing constantly.

Here are just some of the ways your email can not get delivered.

If you are sending email through a mail-merge function, like with Microsoft Outlook, when you deliver that mail from your computer to your ISP you can trigger a filter which will limit the amount of email you can send and the ISP may accept. Worst part–you won’t even get notified. It all looks ok from your end but bing–your mail is stopped.

Or your ISP may accept your email but when it starts to get delivered, people start to hit the ‘this is spam’ button. In some mail systems, when enough ‘this is spam’ buttons are hit, your email gets held. Again, no notification.

Some ISP’s might not stop your mail but they might trigger a blacklist notice. If your domain is added to a blacklist your mail will not get through. Suddenly, you will be sending merrily away and your mail will be held.

Your reputation is suddenly what keeps your mail from getting through.
Some ISP’s but not all, filter your email based on the content. If you use the wrong word you can be labelled as a spammer and bing — no mail.

Another reason for email to be stopped is if you don’t remove bad or old email addresses. This is a problem that can sneak up on you over time. Each month people abandon their email addresses, or change them, or get a new 
ISP. They don’t always notify you to change their address. Then when you email them, their server returns an undeliverable message. If you don’t take care of these notifications then you can trigger a filter that will block you because you have an abnormal amount of bad emails in your list–a sure sign of a spammer.

Lastly, there are all types of email filters, blockers, and spam catchers designed to protect users from spamming. If you aren’t on a person’s safe list or whilelist, you may end up in the junk folder.

Make sure you send a test email to Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and others to see if you end up in the junk folder.

It’s a wonder that with all this technology in place, an email even gets through.

Most will, but don’t let these technology hurdles prevent you from sending email.

Just don’t spend too much time managing your list. Soon it will become overwhelming and instead of a nice clean method to communicate with your customers, you are spending time managing technology.

And in my opinion may not be the best use of your time.