Sinch Community

Sinch specifically supports deliverability and reputation monitoring using API led metrics such as Hard Bounce/Soft Bounce/Complaints and Unsubscribes and offline metrics such as Sender Score reports. Sender Score reports are published for dedicated IP’s only. ... View more

If an IP is blacklisted, Sinch will work with our partners to engage with the ISP involved to remove the blacklisting. Sometimes, it may mean that we need to provision a new ( “uncompromised”) dedicated IP and go through warm up ( again). Note: The primary driver for Blacklisting is either content or bad addresses / SPAM’s / complaints or un-anticipated / sudden spikes in traffic. All of this is directly under the customers control and management.   ... View more

A list of KPI’s provided by the SAP Marketing Cloud are shown below:   Number of Interactions Number of Missing Marketing Permissions Number of Missing Communication Data Number of Sent Messages Number of Delivered Messages Number of Bounces Number of Hard Bounces Number of Soft Bounces Number of Unopened Messages Number of Opened Messages Number of Total Clicks Number of Unique Clicks Bounce Rate Rate of Unopened Messages Rate of Opened Messages Unique Click Rate Click to Open Rate. Note: Not all are based on Sinch data.   ... View more

Sinch E-mail 365 API delivers soft and hard bounces as pre-integrated reports with SAP Marketing Cloud.   The bounce reports are delivered as API calls providing email ID, Notification ID, SMTP error code for bounced requests only.   Bounce statuses are stored for 7 days for a receiving application to call back. Please refer to the API guide for specific’s around the bounce API call.   SLA for soft bounce = 24 hrs SLA for hard bounce = 48 hrs.   ... View more

Yes, the same API interface and infrastructure can be used for marketing as well as transactional emails.   ... View more

Sinch E-mail 365 is designed to deliver personalized email messages. However, should a customer choose this for delivering a common message to bulk recipients, it can easily be handled by passing multiple recipients in the parameter list.   Sinch delivers each notification (even when bulk recipients are requested) as a separate request to enable reporting on the request status individually.   ... View more

An MX record is a publicly available address for an email recipients mail server. When someone, for example:[email protected] sends an email to [email protected], the sender’s mail transfer agent looks up the available MX record at public DNS registry of xyz.com to determine where to deliver emails. A domain/ sub-domain cannot have multiple MX records. However, they can have multiple hosts associated with an MX record organized by priority.   MX record is mandatory to avoid failing anti-virus checkers against the registered domain/sub domain for this service. The MX record is also needed for “reply” tracking. The “reply to” address allows a recipient to respond back to an email. When a marketing / transactional email is replied to, the mail transfer agent looks up DNS entries to determine the MX record of the recipient’s mail server.   ... View more

The core features supported by Sinch E-mail 365 include: Domain and user validations DKIM & SPF based deliverability Support for multiple senders per sub-domain “Reply-to” capability Support for custom “from” tags Soft and hard bounce status reporting Reputation management support Open & Click through metrics via Hybris Marketing “Reply-to” tracking using a dedicated MX record UTF-8 encoding is supported.   ... View more

E-mail throttling is controlling the amount of e-mail messages sent to one ISP or remote server at one time. Sometimes ISPs block messages when a high volume is sent by one sender at one time because they might be concerned its spam. Throttling is an important strategy in email deliverability and can lessening the impact of complaints. For example, an ISP that sees a sender mail 10000 messages in a single hour and then sees 15 spam complaints is certain to harm your reputation more than those complaints spread out over 8 hours.   A sign that throttling may be needed is when ISP’s start publishing deferred delivery response. Additionally, throttling and experimenting with deferred sending strategies can help overcome bounce rates, spam complaints, spam trap hits, or a loss of subscriber engagement. There is no easy solution here and a Sinch deliverability expert can work with a client to manage this process.   Sinch E-mail 365 expects upstream engagement applications to handle throttling capabilities.   A sending time based delivery capability to support enhanced throttling capability is on the product roadmap.   ... View more

Sinch E-mail 365 manages SPAM in two ways: Using SMTP (soft bounce) error codes to determine if an email hit a SPAM filter Using SPAM feedback loops from ISP’s. A Feedback loop is an information provided by the ISP if a customer marked an Email as SPAM. The feedback loops define the complaint rate and the risk that the respective IP is being blocked. Not all ISP’s provide feedback loops. Accounts with excessive SPAM related bounces At this point, Sinch E-mail 365 does not have a policy on inactivating an account with excessive bounces due to SPAM. Our approach is to work with customers in reducing the SPAM footprint and move towards a dedicated IP address mechanism to support such sending domains with excessive bounces.   ... View more

Marketing email SPAM is a complex issue. There are now easy solutions and almost all ISP’s have different parameters: Gmail for instance likes DKIM based authentication. This may not be a strong criteria for other ISP’s. Gmail it appears also likes the list unsubscribe as part of the email. Also; recipient engagement is critical for Gmail. At Gmail, engagement is seen as the sum of total user's actions upon the email. Gmail tracks explicit user's actions (marking email as spam, replying to the email, moving it to the Junk folder etc.), and these explicit actions have a direct relation to how Gmail classifies the email for the given use. If your subscriber opens emails from you on a consistent basis, that shows engagement and favours Inbox placement for the current and next email campaigns. But if the subscriber leaves your emails unread, deletes them without opening or moves them to spam, then Gmail will penalize you because your subscribers don’t appear to be engaged with your emails. Also, simple things like not having too many images or hyperlinks or not using URL shortening services like bit.ly help. Due to their propensity for abuse email messages with shortened URLs have the highest spam rates. Bulk / email marketing sender guidelines for Gmail can be found here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en Other best practices include list hygiene and ensuring double opt-in. For example: Hotmail or live.com has a history of inconsistent SPAM filtering and can tend to appear overtly aggressive. Apart from the standard guidelines similar to Gmail, helpful approaches for live.com are outlined below: Ensure double opt-in Request recipients to marking the sending domain (sender address) as trusted Include an RFC2369-compliant List-Unsubscribe header containing a mailto: address. com only enables this feedback via email, so URIs for other protocols such as http will be ignored. Ensure a valid reply-to address is part of the email. Default addresses such as “noreply@...” or “do-not-reply@...” tend to increase SPAM capture.   ... View more

Sinch has to ensure a high volume of SPAM’s does not impact our IP reputation. Reputation (or sender scores) have a direct co-relation on deliverability. Also, complaints due to SPAM can result in temporary or permanent blacklisting.   One approach to overcome SPAM is to slow or throttle traffic to be delivered in specific time windows only and check for deliverability. The other is to ensure emails sending domains (or email addresses) are marked as safe senders by recipients.   Sending Scores High sending scores do not necessarily ensure that emails are delivered to an inbox. SPAM filter rules are always evolving and an email could be delivered as SPAM for any one of the following reasons: Poor sending history of the sending domain Message content Lack of end-user opt-in etc. Refer to the What are the best practises for overcoming SPAM? FAQ, for best practises for overcoming SPAM.   ... View more

Yes, the email service runs out of a EU based shared sending Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) infrastructure. This infrastructure has been designed for an initial baseline throughput of 1 million emails/hr and shall be scalable with deployment of additional sending MTA’s as email volumes increase.   Supported IP Addresses Currently the following IP ranges are supported: 235.15.(21-23) 235.15.(64-75) These IP ranges have high sending scores that are monitored using the return path.   ... View more

Sinch E-mail 365 interfaces with applications via a JSON interface. However, outbound email notifications are finally delivered via the mail transfer agent as SMTP requests to recipient mail servers. Because we do not handle inbound email relay requests and processing to email clients, an SMTP infrastructure at our end is not needed.   However, Sinch have added SMTP interface for outbound to the email roadmap.   ... View more

Enterprises use a multi-pronged strategy for email infrastructure due to both cost, manage-ability and scale reasons. Transactional emails (such as order confirmations, shipment notifications) or marketing emails are typically handled using 3 rd party ESP. Even here, surveys show that more than 2/3 rd of enterprises that use their home-grown email platform also use an external email service.   Sinch E-mail 365 does not support corporate emails. It services only outbound multi-channel notifications.   Corporate mail ecosystem are typically workgroup clusters consisting of Outlook/Exchange or Lotus Domino. They serve the purpose of establishing and managing individual or group email accounts servicing peer to peer communication using dedicated email clients. Sinch E-mail 365 delivers to recipient email clients; but is consumed by any enterprise application as a pure API interface.   ... View more