Important Notice – Please Review Your Email Quality

Last week, Hotmail suddenly blocked three of our mail servers.

Our initial mitigation requests were rejected.

This was the first time our mitigation requests had ever been rejected, so we suspected that something was seriously wrong. Unfortunately, Hotmail would not tell us the exact cause, so we had to conduct our own investigation.

To recover our blocked servers and, more importantly, prevent other servers from being blocked, we are now conducting a system-wide email quality audit.

This will be done using 3 approaches.

Approach 1 – We Review Your Email Episodes

We have reviewed tens of thousands of email episodes and marked those with potential problems.

The problems include:

• Deceptive subject lines
• Exaggerated or misleading claims
• Excessive links
• Missing images
• Excessive bold text, CAPITAL LETTERS, large font sizes, emoticons, or spam-like colors and formatting
• Content related to high-yield investments, obscenity, adult content, dating, gambling, or drugs

If an email episode is marked, you will see a notice saying:

“Problem email. Please check.“

above the email subject, as shown below.

Problem emails will now be skipped in the email series.

We decided to skip only the affected emails instead of pausing the entire email series because most members only have a few problematic emails. Pausing the entire campaign would be excessive.

Nevertheless, we strongly recommend fixing problem emails as soon as possible so your campaign can continue normally.

To resume sending the email, simply fix the problem and activate the email again.

A small number of members have had their lists temporarily suspended due to serious email quality issues. If your list has been suspended, please check your support ticket for details. Once the issue has been fixed, simply reply to the ticket so we can review and reactivate your list.

Approach 2 – You Review Your Email Episodes

In Approach 1, we could only perform sample checks.

Now, in Approach 2, we need your help to review all email episodes in your account.

To simplify the process, we have added a “Show Email Body” function in the Email Series section.

When you click it, all emails in the Email Series will be displayed like this:

This allows you to quickly review all emails at one go and identify possible problems.

Approach 3 – Email Broadcasts

Since email broadcasts are one-time emails, the handling is slightly different.

We want to avoid manually approving every broadcast email before sending because that would disrupt your campaigns.

Instead, we will monitor email quality in the background.

If a broadcast email has a quality issue, it will be marked as:

“High-risk email. Please avoid.“

This warning is different from the Email Series warning because broadcast emails are not flagged for minor issues such as missing images. If a broadcast email is flagged, it is usually due to a more serious issue.

Please avoid sending emails of a similar nature to reduce the risk of list suspension or server blocking.

In Summary

It is business as usual, but we need your immediate help to review the email quality of your Email Series.

It is very simple. Just follow these 3 steps:

1) Go to Email Series

2) Click ‘Show Email Body‘

3) Review all the emails at one go and make sure they do not contain the following problems:

• Deceptive subject lines
• Exaggerated or misleading claims
• Excessive links
• Missing images
• Excessive bold text, CAPITAL LETTERS, large font sizes, emoticons, or spam-like colors and formatting
• Content related to high-yield investments, obscenity, adult content, dating, gambling, or drugs

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation. Improving email quality is a shared responsibility, and your help will greatly improve deliverability for everyone using SendSteed.

Most importantly, it will help us demonstrate to Hotmail that we are taking serious action to improve email quality so that our blocked servers can be mitigated.