Case Study: How the Postmastery Console & Spamhaus Intelligence API helped Mailpoet to get delisted quickly.
Postmastery: Optimising email delivery with Spamhaus
For more than 10 years, Postmastery has been a leading provider of email delivery optimization and consultancy services, specializing in helping businesses achieve optimal email deliverability and performance. With extensive expertise in email infrastructure, reputation management, and best practices, Postmastery offers tailored solutions and strategic guidance to ensure that businesses can effectively reach their target audience and maximize the impact of their email campaigns.
One of the core offerings of Postmastery is its email delivery optimization services. The team at Postmastery analyzes and assesses the existing email infrastructure, identifying potential bottlenecks and areas for improvement. They provide expert recommendations and implement customized solutions to enhance the deliverability rates, reduce spam complaints, and increase the chances of emails reaching the intended recipients' inboxes. To help its customers, Postmastery designed the Postmastery Console Delivery Analytics to optimize deliverability logs monitoring and alerting.
Postmastery understands the critical role that sender reputation plays in email deliverability. They assist businesses in establishing and maintaining a positive sender reputation. That's why Postmastery leverages Spamhaus datasets to provide blocklisting notifications to their customers. Since June 2022, in order to provide more accurate and complete reputation data, Postmastery is displaying and monitoring the Spamhaus Reputation Score from SIA to all of its customers.
1/ What is MailPoet?
MailPoet is a comprehensive email marketing plugin designed specifically for WordPress websites. It empowers website owners and businesses to create, send, and manage professional email campaigns directly from their WordPress dashboard. With its user-friendly interface, robust features, and seamless integration with WordPress, MailPoet offers a convenient and efficient solution for executing effective email marketing strategies.
MailPoet powers email marketing for over 600,000 WordPress websites and over 60K+ monthly active users. From small businesses sending out weekly newsletters to large corporations and WooCommerce stores emailing tens of thousands of users, MailPoet makes email a reality.
Every day, MailPoet strengthens its verification process in order to block all fake accounts and spammers upstream, and thus offer the best possible reputation to all its customers. Also, in order to optimize its deliverability, MailPoet uses the Postmastery Console, and in particular the Delivery Analytics and Reputation Monitor modules to monitor its delivery logs and its IP/Domain reputation in real time.
In the past, to improve the deliverability back-end, MailPoet hired external delivery experts from Postmastery.
2/ What happened on May 10?
On May 10, MailPoet was confronted with a critical situation when they received an urgent email notification from the Postmastery Console. The notification revealed a concerning fact that three of their IP addresses had been surprisingly blacklisted by the Spamhaus CSS Blacklist. It was alarming to discover that all of these blacklisted IP addresses were part of the same sending pool utilized by certain MailPoet clients.
If not quickly addressed, this type of problem could have an impact on all customers of that IP Pool by increasing their bounce rate.
As the organization assessed the gravity of the situation, it became clear that this issue demanded immediate resolution. Time was of the essence, and an urgent response was needed.
3/ How did Postmastery use SIA data to help solve this case?
By leveraging the suite of tools in the Postmastery Console and the information available from the Spamhaus Intelligence API, Postmastery and MailPoet conducted a rapid analysis of the three affected IP addresses and gathered comprehensive data.
This investigation unveiled crucial details for remedying the situation, including the precise moment when the issue began and registration renewals that took place in close proximity. Armed with these insights, the teams at Postmastery and MailPoet were able to swiftly pinpoint the specific client campaigns triggering the issue, thus quickly and accurately addressing the root cause. As a result, the serious issue was mitigated in hours.
4/How did that fix the situation?
Thanks to the crucial information provided by Postmastery Console and SIA, MailPoet was able to pinpoint specific client campaigns that may have contributed to the problem, in violation of MailPoet’s Terms of Service. This knowledge enabled MailPoet to promptly block the accounts that might be spamming and preserving the use of the IP Pool for all other MailPoet users.
Following these decisive actions, MailPoet proactively reached out to Spamhaus, providing them with detailed information regarding the banned accounts and campaigns, and the stringent preventive measures implemented by MailPoet to avoid any recurrence of the issues.
MailPoet received an email from Spamhaus a few hours later, confirming that all three blacklisted IP addresses had been successfully delisted.
In summary, by leveraging the powerful capabilities of the Postmastery Console and Spamhaus Intelligence API and combining it with the comprehensive data analysis provided by Postmastery's Delivery Analytics, MailPoet efficiently deciphered the root cause of the Spamhaus CSS Listing. Timely action was then taken, ensuring the removal of the blacklisted IPs before any long term detrimental impact on email sending performances could be experienced.