MAAWG Sender Best Communication Practices & Executive Summary

“Both senders and ISPs are allies fighting the same battle, but in the past there has been a language gap between them,” Dayman said. “The senders were asking, ‘what should we do to work more closely with the network operators?’ so MAAWG tackled the issue on a global basis. In these best practices, we have outlined very specific steps that senders can take to reduce the accidental tagging of legitimate email as spam while still protecting consumers from the eighty percent of email traffic that is abusive."

A Different Technical Approach; Supplemental Information for Marketers

The MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices also includes a supplemental Executive Summary for marketers who often manage volume email projects, which was edited by Len Shneyder of MAAWG member company Pivotal Veracity. The summary explains some of the technical recommendations to improve email deliverability and provides a questionnaire marketers can use to determine if their Email Sender Providers are operating within industry best practices.

The complete BCP addresses five topics of concern to both marketers and operations professionals:

• Obtaining email consent
• Recommended unsubscribe options
• Sender accountability and reputation
• List maintenance
• Resolving messaging disruption issues

The recommendations are based on reputation management techniques that help identify the sender as the genuine source of the email. This approach differs from the content filters already used by many ISPs to tag messages containing suspicious words or phrases as spam. For example, the MAAWG Sender BCP recommends that service providers managing email for multiple companies, online marketing agencies and other vendors that send large volumes of emails for multiple clients use a separate IP address for each company so that ISPs can determine that a message has come from a verifiable entity. The best practices also include methods for managing subscriptions and improving consumer relationships.

Download the Executive Summary & BCP here  MAAWG Sender BCP & Executive Summary