MAAWG's New Set of Best Communication Practices for Bulk Senders

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group's (MAAWG) new set of best communication practices for bulk senders is a great resource to help you ratchet up your email message delivery. It covers just about every issue that crops up between senders and ISPs and explains clearly what needs to be done to achieve higher deliverability.

MAAWG, an industry group formed to fight messaging abuse such as spam and fraud email, said its first set of best practices was intended to both help legitimate email from high-volume senders, like email marketers, stand out better from spam and phishing email; and reduce the ISP's burden of sorting good messages from bad.

Although you might bristle at the idea of outsiders telling you how to run your email business, the recommendations have been endorsed by the bipartisan Email Sender and Provider Coalition (ESPC), which seats bulk senders and recipients at the same table.

Also, the best practices closely reflect the standards email senders have developed over the last 10 years or so and explain some technical requirements in fairly plain language. This should help you see the benefits better and be more able to discuss implementing them with your IT department.

In this article, Stefan Pollard provides us with highlights of the five recommendations.