The deliverability department of your router? It's not necessarily your best friend ...

If you are sending mass email, chances are you are using a commercial routing platform. If not, you are either a specialist and know what you are doing, or you are well surrounded, or you are in the ... well, anyway.

Let's say you use a commercial sending platform, you pay an external service to send your emails in the best conditions.

When you were presented with the services offered, you inevitably wanted to be reassured about deliverability performance. That's normal. And you were probably told about all the experience accumulated in the company and the excellent deliverability team in place.

But is this deliverability team at your service?

Good question. But before answering it, let's try to see what the role of a deliverability team in a router can be:

• Technical configuration Deliverability : Part of the deliverability teams will be dedicated to the technical configuration of the accounts. Setting up dedicated IP addresses, maintenance of shared IP address pools, configuration of sending servers, configuration of feedback loops, ...
• Compliance and ISP relationship Deliverability practices are constantly evolving, which is why part of the role of deliverability teams is to follow deliverability news very closely and to maintain good relations with ISPs.
• Surveillance and monitoring  Surveillance and monitoring of activity is a significant part of the work of deliverability specialists. They set up different tools that will allow them to follow the evolution of the reputation of the platform and its various users. This is also where alerts on blacklisting, ... and detected "borderline" senders using the platform and that could have a negative impact on the overall reputation of the platform.
• Incident Resolution And finally, the part we're interested in, incident resolution. Here, when we talk about incidents, it is really when some domains or IPs are blacklisted or blocked by an ISP. In this case, the first step is to analyze the problem upstream in order to correct the situation that led to the blocking, and only then to contact the owner of the blacklist or the ISP in order to request the unblocking. Without resolving the source of the incident, no unblocking is possible.

Now let's rephrase the question. Is the deliverability team's priority to solve your problems?

First element, perhaps your router has not one, but several teams in charge of the different aspects of deliverability. And maybe one of them is actually in charge of supporting you. Bingo! (well maybe)

Secondly, and most importantly, most of the deliverability problems you experience are not the responsibility of your routerbut your own responsibility. It's worth remembering that the overwhelming majority of deliverability problems are caused by poor-quality contact lists (generating a large number of spam complaints) and by a inappropriate content.

Finally, if you are a "victim" of a deliverability problem, because you have really exaggerated (and you look like a spammer), in some extreme cases the router will have every interest in asking you to go elsewhere rather than helping you bypass the filters of ISPs and other webmails. In any case, the first action of the deliverability service that tries to help you will always be to check if you respect some basic principles: opt-in list, up-to-date addresses, possibility to unsubscribe to your program, ...

So yes, your router's deliverability service can eventually help you... but check your practices first before crying wolf! There is no magic!