Category: Email Marketing

Did you ever watch the movie I Robot with Will Smith?

It’s the kind of movie which appeals to me. I love a good science fiction, and if it’s got some robots and artificial intelligence in it, even better.

With a production cost of $120,000,000 it should have been pretty good.

But production costs aren’t always an indicator of quality.

The last Pirates Of The Caribbean movie cost $240,000,000 to make, and an hour in I was dozing off and literally nothing had happened!

It’s reported that Johnny Depp earned $90,000,000 for his role in the movie.

Which is kinda obscene, but hey… if someone offered me that much to act in a film, I’m sure I wouldn’t say no!

But going back to robots, have you ever heard of spambots?

If you haven’t then you’ll be amongst the majority of marketers.

A lot of people don’t know they exist or aren’t sure what they actually are.

But they do exist, and…

…they’re going to spoil your emailing reputation and stats.

I noticed I had some in my newsletters last week when the click rates jumped through the roof.

Of course, I quietly hoped it was because you loved my newsletters so much that you were repeatedly clicking on every link I gave to get more of it!

Alas, it wasn’t the case.

It was a serious case of email bot infestation.

These email addresses work their way onto your mailing lists and open every single email you have, and click on every single link in your emails.

The result is stats that look completely unrealistic.

For example, you may get something like this:

This was on a small mail out I did last week to just a few hundred people.

A 33% click through rate is possible, but historically this list has nearer 10%, so when numbers like this suddenly appear it makes me suspicious.

Generally speaking, if something seems too good to be true, it’s because it’s too good to be true.

I went into the email stats and took a look at who was clicking on the links, and sure enough there were email addresses like this:

The first thing to note, is that this is the click stats for just one link in the email, my Twitter profile.

That in itself is a bit odd, why would anyone click 12 times on my Twitter profile, unlikely but possible.

However, looking at the email address you can see that it’s clearly not a valid email.

I would guess there’s no such domain as gmqil.com.

But, just in case, visiting the webpage brings up this:

Clearly a junk site, and clearly a bogus email address.

If you find one email like that, the chances are there are more.

Quickly running through the click stats for a few campaigns revealed that there were a number of email addresses doing the same thing.

Every email I sent saw more spambot clicking taking place.

Yup, they’re pretty clever, they don’t all just hit at once, they do it over a period of time.

Why do people use these spambots?

Because the spammers are trying to find weaknesses in your emailing setup and website to send spam through your services.

Assholes I know!

So, let’s assume you’re like me and find some spambots on your mailing list. How do you get rid of them?

If you only have a handful then you can manually delete them and blacklist them.

Then make sure you go and check your optin forms, maybe add a confirmation email, or another step to try and weed them out.

Putting a hidden field in the form, which if filled in is segmenting off your mailing list and you can manually go and blacklist them periodically is another way to catch the bots.

Alternatively, you could also use a paid service like ZeroBounce.

But if you have an infestation of them, it can be much harder.

Once upon a time it was easy enough, you sent out an email with a hidden link, just a white full stop, which auto-unsubscribed anybody who clicked on it.

As it wasn’t visible, it was only the spambots that were going to click on it.

Simple and effective.

Unfortunately, as is the way with hackers, they got smarter, and managed to make sure their bots detect these blank links.

Now there’s only two ways I know of to get rid of them.

The paid way is to use a service like ZeroBounce, but being totally honest, none of these list cleaning services are 100% accurate.

I prefer a more manual way, which is just as fast and completely free.

First of all export all clickers from the last few emails you sent, and import these leads into a new mailing list.

Give the mailing list a name like SpamBot Check, so you know what it’s for.

You’re only going to use it once, you can delete it when you’re finished.

Now create a new email broadcast, and write something like this:

Hi there,

So it turns out I’ve had some despicable spammers trying to target this awesome newsletter.

As one of my most valued readers, I wanted to let you know that I’m going through a process of removing them.

To continue getting my emails, PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ON ANY LINKS IN THIS EMAIL.

You see the spambots will click the link in this email, and they will be removed to make sure you still receive the best newsletter possible.

Thanks for your help against the spammers.

All the best,

YOUR NAME

A nice and simple email that nobody will mind receiving.

Make sure you link the capital letters to an auto-unsubscribe form. If your email provider doesn’t allow that, then link to some random page that’s not on your website, it could just be google.com, it doesn’t matter where.

Send out your email and wait twenty four to forty eight hours.

During this time keep an eye on your email stats, you’re looking for the click and open counts to stop increasing, when they look like they’ve come to a stand still it’s time to get rid of the spambots!

Go into your email stats and pull up a list of every single email address that clicked a link in your email.

Unsubscribe them all immediately from all your mailing lists.

Then import them into the Global Blacklist for your mailer. If you’re not sure how to do that, contact your mailer’s support desk and find out.

This will mean that even if they join your mailing list again, they’ll automatically be blacklisted and removed from every email you send.

If you find yourself getting spambots repeatedly then you’re going to need to either put some kind of captcha on your optin page, or use a service like ZeroBounce to verify the emails before they’re added to your email list.

However, 99% of the time simply doing the process above will stop the issue.

See you tomorrow,

Michael
The Online Hustle

P.S. If you want to become a full member of The Online Hustle and get an email every day Tuesday-Friday, you can join here for just a fiver:

https://michaelwilding.com/join-the-online-hustle/

P.P.S. If you’re buying lists (which is never a good idea) you’re going to more susceptible to picking up spambots!

Yes… I cocked up my emailing last week!

Having said how good the delivery rate on my mail server was, which it still is for all sites except www.michaelwilding.com, I promptly got the domain blacklisted at Google.

What does this mean?

It looks like this:

Pretty damn bad!

In reality what it means is that all Gmail emails I send from with the FROM address as @michaelwilding.com will bounce.

Bloody brilliant.

What this means, is that for the next few weeks you may get two emails from me. I’ll be sending one from my normal mailer and one from Substack.

You see, Substack actually use a different FROM address in the emails they send, which means they’re landing in Gmail inboxes.

If you get my emails twice then you’re probably not using Gmail, or… the recovery has begun 😀

Since this has happened, I thought I’d use today’s email to explain how it happened, so you can avoid it, and what to do to recover from it if it has happened to you.

A word of warning, the methods I outline below assume that you are mailing properly. They won’t work if you spam people, get your domain blocked and then want to unblock it!

Let me begin by explaining how I got my domain blacklisted in the first place…

I’ve not been writing this newsletter for a while, a good few months. 

When you don’t send emails for an extended period of time your domain and mailer reputation will gradually decline.

My mailer reputation hasn’t declined because I use that for my other businesses, and it has been continuing to send large volumes of emails.

But what did decline was my domain reputation.

Being the numpty that I am, when I started the newsletter again I emailed my old newsletter list to see who was still interested in reading my emails.

This list numbered around 32,000 people.

The problem is… having not sent any emails to it for an extended period of time, the domain reputation for emails has declined and then suddenly, out of nowhere, it gets 32,000 emails sent from it.

A bunch of those emails will now be bounces and/or spam traps. Because I’ve not been emailing regularly, the email addresses that have gone bad aren’t being removed as they go bad.

So much time has passed that some will not only no longer exist, but will have been turned into spam traps by the mail provides such as Google.

And you know what it looks like when someone emails a list of 32,000 emails, out of nowhere… 

…spam!

To be honest I’ve been doing this long enough that I should have known better.

But hey ho, we all make mistakes.

Since I’ve now demolised my domains reputation in Google, the question is… how the heck is it going to get fixed.

I can’t simply go and move domains, after all this is my personal name, which means the only option is to fix it.

Fixing these things is never quick, so never try to do it overnight.

At the best it may take a couple of weeks, but you can assume there will be some issues in email delivery to the affected mail providers for at least a couple of months.

After all, the mail provider has to be sure that you’re not going to be sending spam emails.

Which is why you can expect to receive two emails from me, Tuesday to Friday (if you’re fully subscribed), until the issue is fixed.

That’s just to make sure you get the emails!

Luckily fixing the issue isn’t particularly difficult. You need to go to:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/188131

Once you’re on this page scroll down to the bottom where it links to Bulk Sender Guidelines. These are at:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126

Make sure you read through these, if you’re not doing any of them then this process isn’t going to work for you.

If you’re doing everything you’re supposed to, click on the link to Troubleshooting For Bulk Email Senders. It takes you here:

https://support.google.com/mail/troubleshooter/2696779

Go through all the steps on this page and answer the questions. When you’ve answered all the questions you will see the option to Contact The Gmail Team.

This is where you want to be 🙂

Clicking on that link will bring you to this page:

https://support.google.com/mail/contact/bulk_send_new

A contact form that goes directly to the Gmail bulk email sender team. 

Go through the form and fill in the fields in as much detail as possible.

Remember, you MUST have figured out what caused the issue before you contact Gmail. There’s no point in contacting them and saying you don’t know what happened. Being able to say what caused the issue and how you rectified it so it won’t happen again is paramount to them unblocking you.

After you’ve submitted your form, you’ll be told that it will take up to 14 days to start seeing an improvement in your domain score.

And you’re all done!

While you’re waiting for your reputation to improve you should continue emailing to Gmail email addresses, but make sure they’re good email addresses. Any you think that are not 100% interested in what you want and haven’t recently requested you to contact them or interacted with your emails should not be sent to.

Of course, you can expect them all to bounce for a period of time. 

(which is why I’m sending from two places)

If you haven’t got the luxury of sending from two places, then post the situation on your social media channels and tell your followers what’s happening and that they may not receive your emails for a few weeks. 

However, if you post your newsletters on your blog, or your mailing software archives them online, then you can post a link to your online newsletter in your social media accounts so that your followers can still read them even if they’re not receiving the emails.

So there you have it, how to get your blacklisted Gmail domain un-blacklisted the right way 🙂

Until tomorrow, unless you’re not a full member, in which case here’s where you become one:

https://michaelwilding.com/join-the-online-hustle/

Michael
The Online Hustle

P.S. It’s better to not get your domain blacklisted to start with. Be warned Gmail is considering the domain reputation more than the mailer IP now, and this means it’s likely to start happening with other mail providers as well in the not-to-distant future!