After being asked about the differences in Items 3 and 4 from Wednesday’s Post, Q&A; | Email formatting, a few examples are needed to show how these were intended to be used.

Item 3 – Scrubbing services accounts

A Service account is an account that should be maintained by every domain as per the standards set by RFC 2142. These addresses are reserved for specific functions relating to the management of your domain, these should not be used for commercial email. Here are a few examples; Postmaster is used for general email or mail server issues, Webmaster is reserved for Web page errors, content and broken links.

Mailing to these types of addresses will eventually land you on a blocklists or in a worst case scenario, looking for a new hosting company… Which might be a problem as may ISPs and hosts participate in industry groups and may share data on bad behaviour.

Item 4 – Reviewing your list

These types of addresses [email, spam , junk] should be flagged for visual review. You might find that a small segment of these types of addresses are found in your list and the legitimacy can be decided on by a person that reviews the email…

Example: emailkarma+nospam@example.com might be something to flag for removal but emailkarma+goodemail@example.com might be something to keep on your list.

You should add additional criteria to this based on your needs, some mailers will not allow companyname@example.com to be added to there lists, or alais@alias.com to prevent potential fraudulent subscriptions.