Sustainable email sending programs in an inherently hostile environment now require great care and planning. Before considering technical complexities and marketing tactics, email senders must adopt this basic paradigm shift.

The five guidelines included in this series should become watchwords for ezine emailers as they incur the risk and responsibility of sending newsletters or any other repetitive type of email.

Part 1 of 5: Treat Email as a True Risk and Cost Center
Part 2 of 5: Avoid Collateral Damage
Part 3 of 5: Use the Available (Legitimate) Tools and Tactics (M2M)
Part 4 of 5: Build Strong Relationships (H2H)
Part 5 of 5: Continuously Evaluate

Part 3 of 5

Use the Available (Legitimate) Tools and Tactics (M2M)
within your email sending system

One of the most basic systematic distinctions influencing email performance is between those barriers operating under human control, and those that are under machine control. Email senders today need to understand and work within this dicotomy. Remember:

* Human solutions (such as ISP relations) tend to work for human-run systems (H2H)
* Machine responses (such as sender authentication) tend to work for machine systems (M2M)
* Not understanding the differences between these types of systems tends to create at lot of frustration

Most of the systems that stop your email are automated. This means machines, not people, determine whether your email gets through. From client-side boxed software packages to ISP email profiling systems, it is usually the things that machines can see and measure that count the most.

Many ESPs rely almost exclusively on H2H "ISP relationships" at major recipient ISPs for delivery improvement. Email managers need to remember that only a few ISPs even offer such channels, and that a large portion of their email list addresses are at ISPs that don't. For those destinations, and just as importantly, for all of the outside monitoring systems that watch and record email flows, your technical (M2M) sending behavior is the primary determinant of your success.

This section addresses the machine-to-machine (M2M) communication universe - that strange virtual place where what people think and see counts for little, but where algorithms, rule sets, and thresholds control everything. Of course, people usually set those rules and thresholds, but once in place the machines do the sorting, filtering, and blocking. And they determine whether your recipients get your messages.

Email delivery and communications is your business, and your responsibility
Successful email communications programs actively use many types of M2M tools and tactics to overcome delivery barriers and to improve the level of recipient response. In fact, at a point in time where 22% of permission-based email from a wide spectrum of sources is being erroneously blocked, and with email response rates far below their historical highs, managers cannot afford to just accept the status quo. From HTML checkers to drop-box landing systems to sending profile control systems, email managers already use a range of M2M tools and resources; first to map out their own email delivery situations, and then to take corrective action. Even at the most elementary level, investigation and remediation of sending errors or delivery failures can dramatically turn around difficult situations.

Senders can effectively use either internal or external solutions
With the right controls in place, outbound email programs can effectively use either (or both) internal or external sending resources. The goal is to cost-effectively access the expertise and capacity necessary to operate a sustainable system. To do this email managers first have to realistically evaluate their internal capabilities as well as the claims of potential Email Service Providers.

The key to this process is to ask the right questions! In an era dominated by delivery and sustainability problems, many managers still evaluate systems only on the basis of convenience or ease of use. Old