
Email Best Practices 101
This email boot camp will help you to increase the ROI of your email operations with 15 proven tactics for boosting email deliverability.
For most users, how an email message flows from the sender to a recipient’s inbox is something that happens behind the scenes. When an individual or an organization sends an email, the message travels from its point of origination, such as an email client where it was composed, across the Internet to its destination. Along the way, it passes through multiple servers that help ensure it arrives at the right place. That email message flow uses a systematic process based on a number of long-established technical standards.
Email has been around since the 1960s, when the creators of nascent computer networks began devising ways to send messages to each other. In those early days, users were limited to communicating only with others on the same shared mainframe system. However, the adoption of standard protocols and the interconnection of systems into the shared network we now know as the Internet allowed different mail systems to “talk” to each other.
It’s these standards that allow us to send email messages to virtually anyone. When someone sends an email message, it flows through a series of steps to reach its destination.
Web-based email services like Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook.com use their own internal protocols to manage email. But when recipients use a stand-alone email client on a phone or desktop computer, that software uses standard protocols to download messages from mail servers.
When the recipient uses POP, the server delivers all new emails to them and only keeps copies of them if an option in the email client is checked, if applicable. If the server doesn’t have copies of the emails and the recipient suffers a hardware loss or failure, those messages are gone forever, unless the senders have copies of them.
When the recipient uses IMAP, the server syncs the contents of the mailbox, including its Sent Items and other folders, to each device that connects with it. The messages remain on the server, and when the status of one changes (for example, it’s read or deleted), that change propagates across all devices when they connect again.
The ability to retain and sync messages on multiple devices is why most email services today use IMAP instead of POP.
Email involves many different steps and systems. You can learn more about the inner workings of email delivery with these resources:
The SparkPost Support Center is a good place to start learning about SparkPost in general. To learn more about how to improve email message flow and practices for good email deliverability, these resources are a good place to begin:
Develop your email industry expertise and master best practices with SparkPost’s email resources.
This email boot camp will help you to increase the ROI of your email operations with 15 proven tactics for boosting email deliverability.
Learn how third-party data shows the deliverability difference between SparkPost and also-ran cloud service providers yields hard, bottom-line benefits.
This practical course is a great way to get started understanding email deliverability and how to measure email performance.
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