How postmasters of different mail services work. How to get to Inbox: everything about postmasters
No matter how comical it may sound, the most important thing in communicating with a client is that the communication takes place. The information noise is intensifying every day: we no longer notice banners on websites and advertising on the street, we scroll through SMS messages and cannot stand calls offering a new super promotion. But mail is a channel that we never stop using, whether we want it or not, looking through at least the subject lines of letters every day. Even the brightest headlines, thoughtful, memorable design and high-quality sales text will not bring you sales if the letters do not end up in your inbox.
Mail services such as Gmail, Mail.ru or Yandex carefully ensure that their customers receive fewer unwanted emails. How formidable spam filters work, and how send an email newsletter so as not to fall into their traps?
There are a number of factors due to which your messages may not reach the recipient:
- Use double confirmation(double-opt-in) upon subscription. This will allow you to collect a base of existing, accessible and interested subscribers. With this method of subscription, if questions arise about the legitimacy of the newsletter, you can always easily provide evidence to mail services ( general provisions of Mail.ru).
- Use mailvalidator.ru - paid service for check email addresses. With its help, you will clear the list of non-existent and duplicate addresses, as well as spam traps. The algorithm does not check 100%, and with corporate addresses It may not filter out everything, but there is nothing better for checking the database now.
- Confirm your rights to the domain ( ) and constantly use a postmaster to track your audience's response to your emails.
Setting up Postmaster Mail.ru
With the help of Postmaster Mail.ru, you can control the reach of letters to Mail.ru mailboxes (@mail.ru, @inbox.ru, @list.ru, @bk.ru), collect user complaints about the mailing list (FBL), and also monitor ESP platform through which the newsletter is sent.
Instructions for setting up Postmaster Mail.ru
1. Go to the Postmaster Mail.ru page( https://postmaster.mail.ru/ ) and log in using your email login and password on Mail.ru.
3. In the next step, you need to specify the domain name and click the “Add domain” button.
4. After adding a domain, you must confirm domain ownership. This can be done in three ways: place an HTML file, specify a Meta tag, or go through a DNS check.
5. In the best way confirmation of the right to manage a domain is a DNS check. To do this, you need to go to the “DNS check” tab and copy the value of the DNS record. The DNS record value must be placed in the domain DNS records using the interface of the hosting provider or domain name registrar.
After adding an entry in the hosting provider’s interface, you must return to the Postmaster Mail.ru page and click on the “Confirm” button.
6. After successful confirmation, the domain name will appear in the Postmaster Mail.ru interface.
7. After sending mailings, Postmater Mail.ru will display statistics on the number of letters sent and their status: “Delivered”, “Possibly spam”, “Definitely spam”.
Setting up Postmaster Tools by Gmail
Postmaster Tools by Gmail is a tool similar to Postmaster Mail.ru, but is responsible for monitoring the deliverability of letters to Gmail.com (@gmail.com or @googlemail.com).
Instructions for setting up Postmaster Tools by Gmail
- Go to the Postmaster Mail.ru page ( https://gmail.com/postmaster/ ) and log in using your email login and password on Gmail.com.
3. In the form that appears, you must provide a link to your domain and click the “Next” button.
4. At this step, you need to confirm domain ownership rights. To do this, you need to copy the DNS record value. The DNS record value must be placed in the domain DNS records using the interface of the hosting provider or domain name registrar.
After adding an entry in the hosting provider’s interface, you must return to the Postmaster Tools by Gmail page and click on the “Confirm” button.
5. After successfully confirming the rights to the domain, it will appear in the Postmaster Tools by Gmail interface with the status “Confirmed”.
6. After connecting Postmaster Tools by Gmail to the domain, you can track: the share of spam hits, IP reputation, domain reputation, etc.
Setting up "Yandex Post Office"
"Yandex Post Office" is an email marketing tool that helps control the effectiveness of mailings sent to mailboxes"Yandex" (@yandex.ru, @ya.ru, @narod.ru, etc.).
Instructions for setting up Yandex Post Office
1. Go to the “Yandex Post Office” page ( postmaster.yandex.ru ) and log in using your Yandex email username and password or using your social media account.
2. In the form that appears, you must provide a link to your domain and click the “Add” button.
3. After adding, you must confirm domain ownership rights. To do this, you need to create “ Text Document"(notepad) and copy the proposed code "by Yandex Post Office" into it (second line). Next you need to save text file with a name suggested by “Yandex Post Office” (first line). When saving the file, make sure the extension is html file, not txt. Afterwards, the file must be uploaded to the root directory of the site via an FTP client.
4. After successful confirmation, the domain name will appear in the “My Domains” section of the “Post Office” interface.
5. In order to find out the statistics on the delivery rate of letters to Yandex mailboxes, you need to click on the domain name. And to get more detailed report, you must click on the subject of the letter.
And in this one, we’ll talk about such a tool as the postmaster.
Postmaster in in a general sense is a tool provided by an email provider to analyze the results of mass mailings.
This tool will help you find out the delivery rate of your mailings, the reaction of subscribers, as well as some problems that have arisen. This information will be useful when planning and optimizing your future email marketing strategy.
Let's consider the capabilities of postmasters of the most popular email platforms, namely:
- Postmaster Mail.ru
- Post Office Yandex
- Gmail Postmaster
- AOL Postmaster
- Yahoo Postmaster
- Postmaster Outlook.com
Postmaster Mail.ru
How to connect?
To connect to the Mail.ru postmaster, register your mail in Mail.ru and go to the postmaster page.
Mail.ru interface
To display statistics, you must confirm rights to the domain with any of three ways: HTML file, meta tag or DNS check. If rights check is successful, statistics on this domain will become available.
Confirmation of domain rights in Mail.ru
What can he do?
Postmaster Mail.ru provides access to mailing statistics, grouping it by day, week or month.
Mailing statistics in Mail.ru
Among the proposed parameters:
- Letters - number of letters sent;
- Complaints - the number of clicks on the “Spam” button;
- Reputation, % - average percentage of complaints over 30 days. It is calculated as the ratio of the number of complaints over 30 days to the total number of submissions during this period of time and is expressed as a percentage;
- Trend, % - change in the percentage of complaints for 7 days in relation to the percentage for 30 days;
- Read - quantity open letters;
- Delete read - number of messages deleted after reading;
- Delete unreadable - number of messages deleted before being read;
- Delivered, % - percentage of the following types of letters:
- Delivered - the number of emails delivered to the Inbox;
- Possibly spam - the number of emails delivered to the Spam folder;
- Exactly spam - the number of letters that were not accepted by Mail.Ru servers. In response to such letters, you always receive a letter with the error 550 spam message discarded.
Most important characteristics here are the current reputation and the percentage of delivered letters. These criteria most clearly reflect the state of the mailing list and its dynamics,
The graphs on the adjacent tab clearly demonstrate the dynamics of a particular indicator:
In addition to grouping by day, it is possible to see general statistics By individual messages. You can do this on the “Letters” tab. This type of grouping is useful if several letters were sent on the same day and you need to see statistics on complaints and deliverability for each of these letters.
Mail.ru Postmaster supports FeedBack Loop technology. We've already told you about it. To connect to FBL, you must specify the email address to which reports will begin to be sent. This can be done on the settings page.
Unfortunately, the postmaster does not have open API. The absence of this feature will complicate the implementation of automatic uploading of reports. .
Post Office Yandex
This service is useful for email marketers, as it provides large volume data, thanks to which you can improve your mailings and make them more effective.
How to connect?
To connect the Yandex post office, register your email and go to the post office page.
Enter the domain in the field that appears and click on the “Add” button:
After which the service will provide setup instructions:
After confirming rights, the domain will appear in the “My Domains” list on the main page of the service.
To set up FBL, you must request activation through the form via the link. At the same time, for Yandex it is impossible to configure FBL for a specific domain; you only need to specify the pool of IP addresses from which your messages are sent.
What can he do?
Yandex post office, just like Mail.ru, provides access to detailed mailing statistics.
On the domain statistics page, the grouping is by message subject, sorted in chronological order, in contrast to the “Subject” tab, where messages are sorted alphabetically.
Example of Yandex statistics
Clicking on the letter opens detailed statistics in the form of a graph:
Need more?
Additionally, you can view more complete statistics:
Particularly interesting here is the statistics of subscriber activity over time and within the letter. From here you can find out how many people viewed the letter to the end, how much time subscribers spend reading the letter, what time of day they open it, and how much time passes from the moment they receive it to reading the letter. By analyzing this information, you can adjust the time of sending the letter, its length and the volume of texts inside, which will improve the effectiveness of mailings.
You can also download all statistics on writing in the form of a pdf file with a large number of different graphs.
When you first log in, you will be prompted to add a new domain:
You can also do this by clicking on the “Add” button on the main page of the postmaster.
In addition to confirmation via a TXT record, it is possible to use a CNAME record for authentication.
After confirming the domain, it will appear in the list of domains on the main page of the postmaster.
What can he do?
Gmail Postmaster allows you to receive less detailed information about your newsletters. Among those available:
- proportion of hits to spam;
- IP and domain reputation;
- information about authentication (passing DKIM, SPF and DMARC checks);
- information about traffic encryption (TLS share);
- information about delivery failures.
FBL mechanism is also available.
All reports in Gmail Postmaster are generated in the form of graphs and tables with a sample of data for a period of 7 to 120 days.
Please note that information in the reports may be missing if there is a small number of shipments to postal Gmail mailboxes. The data will begin to be displayed when there is a sufficient amount (hundreds of records) of daily traffic data.
Example of a report “Proportion of hits to spam”
Gmail Postmaster is not the best handy tool for analyzing mailings, but clearly shows the dynamics of domain and IP reputation and statistics on the passage of , and .
AOL Postmaster
Unlike the services above, AOL Postmaster has other functions, the main ones:
- the ability to enter your IP into White list;
- IP reputation check;
- IP verification (checking the use of firewalls and proxies);
- database of returned error codes.
These functions are available without registration. To use them, you need to fill out and submit the appropriate form.
To set up FBL, submit a connection request by filling out this form.
After filling, click on the Next button.
AOL Postmaster Form Example
In the next step, select mailboxes for confirmation (3 options are offered: [email protected] , [email protected] or [email protected]) and domain IP addresses.
After filling out the form, an email with a link and confirmation code will be sent to the selected address.
After confirmation, FBL reports will begin to arrive at the email address specified in the first step.
Yahoo Postmaster
Yahoo Postmaster also does not provide mailing statistics; its only function is FeedBack Loop.
To connect, we need an account in the service. After registration, go to the postmaster page.
To set up FBL, follow the link and fill out the form.
After sending the form to your mailbox [email protected](don't forget to set up this mailbox on your domain) a confirmation code will be sent. This code must be entered to confirm rights to the domain.
As soon as the domain is confirmed, reports will begin to be sent to the mailbox specified in the form.
Postmaster Outlook.com
On the Junk Mail Reporting Program page, fill out and submit the form:
Here you must enter all the IP addresses from which newsletters are sent. When you enter your IP address, the service offers a choice of mailboxes, to which, after submitting the form, you will receive a letter with a confirmation link. You need to cross it.
Also, a contract will be sent to the contact box indicated above using the docusign.net service, which must be signed to complete the account setup.
After all requirements are met, notifications about complaints about mailings will begin to arrive at the specified mailbox.
Outlook.com Services
- monitor the reputation of your IP addresses in the Microsoft ecosystem,
- determine Accounts users or computers used to send spam email,
- remove complaining subscribers from the database.
conclusions
By correctly using the tools described above, you can significantly improve your mailing performance and make your emails interesting and convenient for subscribers. By tracking your delivery rates you will always be in the know. current situation both technically and qualitative side. And the FBL mechanism will allow you to avoid sending letters to uninterested recipients.
Today it is difficult to find an Internet project that would not communicate with its audience through Email. On the other hand, the monthly audience of Mail.Ru Mail is almost 23 million people. This means that among the recipients of your messages there will probably be many (even very many) addresses in the mail.ru, bk.ru, list.ru and inbox.ru domains. Let's face it, many popular projects have more than half of their users with addresses on mail.ru.
So what is Postmaster?
This tool is convenient, intuitive and simple as felt boots (by at least, it seems so to us). In order to start using it, you just need to add your domain to the project database and confirm the rights to it. This can be done in several traditional ways - by creating special file in the root of the web server, adding a meta tag to the header home page or using DNS check. Of course, you can add as many domains as you use in your project.
Immediately after confirming the rights to the domain, the following useful statistics become available to you:
- Total number of emails sent
- Number of complaints
- Number of successfully delivered messages
- Number of emails deleted as spam or marked as possible spam
- Number of emails sent to non-existent addresses
You probably know that SMTP protocol makes it easy to fake the sender's address. Therefore, to distinguish your mailings from spam ones, we use a DKIM signature. From here important note: For the statistics to work, your emails must be signed with DKIM. If your project doesn't already do this, set up your mail server now (it's easy; many modern MTAs support DKIM out of the box). By the way, this has a positive effect on deliverability not only for mail.ru, but for everyone postal systems and spam filters.
In addition, on postmaster we have collected more a large number of useful information for webmasters.
First, a set of rules that mailings must comply with so that they are most likely to successfully reach users' mailboxes. There is nothing unusual or taken out of the blue - all recommendations are based solely on common sense, based on RFC standards, the world's best practices in this area. As we pursue our goals, we must all remember that user comfort and convenience are ultimately what matters.
Secondly, we have published detailed transcripts of the most common errors mentioned in letters with “bangs”, which you can receive from our mail servers. And most importantly - brief and effective recommendations for their consideration.
Of course, postmaster.mail.ru does not cancel the address [email protected], to which we continue to accept all questions related to the delivery of letters to mailboxes in our domains, we carefully read and always answer. But we sincerely hope that the appearance of this tool will make your life much easier and your mailings more effective.
Of course, this is just the beginning. Our immediate plans include a breakdown of statistics by letter type (i.e. the ability to monitor individual mailings) and support for FBL technology. It will also be possible to obtain more detailed information about the effectiveness of mailings: the percentage of letters read, the percentage of deleted unread/read messages, the percentage of letters that ended up in the “spam” folder according to the user’s personal black list (personal antispam) and much more.
Our goal is to make postmaster.mail.ru as convenient as possible for you. Therefore, do not hesitate to leave your comments and suggestions in the comments. All of them will be read, analyzed and taken into account as much as possible.
Vasily Bespalov,
Head of Antispam [email protected]
You can make a useful newsletter with good text, beautiful design and high-quality layout, and then see that two and a half people read it (you are among them). And all because your letters ended up in spam and did not reach the final recipient. You must not only be able to make mailings, but also deliver them. This cannot be done effectively without high-quality analytics.
Postmasters is a tool for analytics of your mailing list, which all the most popular ones have mail providers: gmail, mail.ru, yandex, hotmail, yahoo, aol. They help you find out your spam rating, IP and domain reputation, delivery errors, and improve your mailing deliverability based on these indicators. Whatever postmasters we are talking about, for them to work, DKIM (Domain keys identified mails) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) must be configured - these settings are needed to identify and authenticate the sender. Without these settings, postmasters will work, but not completely; mainly, the FeedBack Loop function, with which you can find out how a subscriber interacts with the letter, will not be available.
Almost every major mail service has its own postmasters. Each has its own, that is, after setting up the postmaster on mail.ru, it will not work on Yandex or Google. There you will need to configure your postmasters. They all differ in interface and slightly in functionality. Set up postmasters for the services you send to. significant amount letters.
Feedback loop - a function thanks to which we will receive a report on who clicked the spam button, and thanks to this we will be able to guess why (for example, looking at the history of his interaction with the mailing list). And this information can already be used to adjust the mailing list and reduce getting into spam. By default the feedback loop is disabled, it needs to be configured.
Delivery Errors Dashboard feature displays delivery errors. There are many reasons for these errors: bad reputation of the IP or domain; attachments that gmail does not support; spam content; DMARK check failed. And this is not the whole list. In the report you can see detailed information on each error; just click on it. Encryption Dashboard shows the ratio of the total number of letters to letters with TLS (Transport Layer Security) code. Messages with this protocol are protected from unauthorized access.
There are companies that send mailings to a database of foreign addresses. Your clients from New York have heard something about Yandex, but know nothing at all about mail.ru, but they themselves use mail from Yahoo. We will now consider this postmaster.
Yahoo
Go to Postmaster, click New Sender Application, fill out the form. We are now registered as a new sender. After that, click Feedback Loop Application and also fill out the form. This is how we apply to connect the Feedback Loop. After this we receive a mailbox [email protected](on your domain), where reports on the work of the mailing list will be sent to Yahoo mail. From them you will find out how many times your mailing was marked as spam. Separately worth noting feedback that this service provides. All communication takes place on English language, but users actually get questions answered. There is a forum where you can ask a question. The forum is live, it is quite possible to get an answer to your question.
AOL - American Online
AOL (American OnLine) has had its own since 2004 mail client. Today the company owns such brands as Moviefonet, Engadget, TechCrunch, MAKERS, and Stylelist. AOL has a postmaster, which we will look at. Here more features, and the menu is more friendly than in Yahoo.
The AOL postmaster has his own blog where he publishes last news and changes in the operation of the service.
We go to the postmaster, we see three menu items: popular links, tools and technical assistance, reference information.
In chapter popular Links Can:
- view error codes;
- add your IP list to the white list (does not work if it is already blacklisted);
- apply to connect FeedBack Loop;
- create a bug report. There are several types of errors in the menu, which give a short description of them, and what needs to be done before writing about the problem. When you click create (error name) ticket opens convenient form to fill out information;
- AOL mail servers. Changes to your mail servers are displayed here.
In chapter Tools & Technical help Can:
- check IP reputation;
- verify the IP connection. You should go through this verification if you are not sure whether your emails pass through firewalls and proxy servers or not.
- Read the instructions for passing the Telnet test. It is needed to manually configure mailing via Telnet.
AOL's Postmaster interface is much more user friendly than Yahoo's. The service has existed since 2004 and has been actively developing since then. In 2012 they updated the design and recently added integration with Outlook Express. If you work with mailing lists in the Western market, we recommend setting up a postmaster from AOL.
All of these postmasters are largely similar in function or settings requirements, but some stand out from their competitors.
When Google launched its postmaster a year ago, it did not have full functionality as it does now. Much was added that same fall. Now we see that the yahoo postmaster is a bare FeedBack Loop - almost no one does this anymore. It is logical to expect changes in the functionality of this postmaster. If they are significant, we will definitely report about it on our blog.
Set up your postmasters and welcome to your inbox!
The topic this topic is dedicated to is specific by definition - mailings. However, we are sure that some hackers sometimes use this type of communication. How to make it effective for you and painless for the recipients is written below.
Users often consider mailings to which they once personally subscribed to be spam, but formally this is not entirely true. But, of course, mailbox owners have no time for terminological subtleties - and, as a rule, they call any unwanted letters spam.
The purpose of the Postmaster.mail.ru service, which this article is devoted to, is to help web projects control the flow of electronic correspondence going to users’ mailboxes.
Since publishing about the new service for senders of mass mailings, postmaster.mail.ru, we have received dozens of reviews and suggestions.
During this time, several thousand Internet projects joined the service (including very large ones - such as Groupon, for example). We take into account your wishes and will try to implement them all.
Over the past period, quite a lot of changes have occurred in the service:
- The “Letters” section has appeared. In it you can see detailed statistics on different types letters.
- In detailed statistics for a domain or for a specific letter, new counters have appeared (the number of open letters, the number of deleted open letters and the number of letters that were deleted unopened).
- The interface has been partially redesigned.
- The accuracy of statistics collection has increased.
Separate statistics by email type
In the new “Letters” section you can view detailed statistics for each type of letter. For example, you can view both statistics on user registration letters and, independently of this, statistics on password recovery letters.
To start using this new opportunity, you need to add a special header to each letter: X-Mailru-Msgtype. An arbitrary set can be used as a value English letters and numbers up to 32 characters long. The header value will be used to group messages of the same type.
New statistics
It is also now possible to view statistics on letters, open by users. This is unique information, since it is impossible to find out these numbers in any other way (and, as far as we know, no mail in the world yet gives senders the opportunity to find out such numbers). On the “Details” page for the selected domain or email you can see:- Number of open emails for the selected period (per this moment this is a simple counter of non-unique discoveries, i.e. If a user opens the same email 10 times in a day, then 10 will be added to the counter).
- Number of deleted emails that were not opened. By this indicator you can judge how interesting the letters are to the audience.
- Number of emails that were deleted after opening.
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that these statistics are collected for the current day, i.e. if you sent, for example, 100 letters yesterday, and not a single one today, then the statistics for today on openings and deletions will not be zero, because users do not read your letters instantly, but with some delay.
All this, we hope, will help mailing list senders analyze the flow of letters more carefully and adjust it for the better, focusing on user reaction.
Our immediate plans include the implementation of FBL technology (although this does not directly apply to the postmaster service), as well as a special API for accessing postmaster data.
We will be happy to read your feedback about working with postmaster.mail.ru in the comments or in a letter to [email protected].
Vasily Bespalov,
Head of Antispam Mail.Ru Mail.