Summary
Email delivery outages at major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Orange can significantly disrupt your email campaigns and impact sender reputation. This summary provides insights into how to respond effectively, drawing from expert advice, marketer experiences, and technical documentation. Understanding the nature of the outage, monitoring your sending metrics, and having a predefined response plan are crucial for minimizing negative effects.
Key findings
- Outage detection: Early detection of an ISP outage is critical. This often comes through direct notifications from the ISP, community alerts, or monitoring your own email sending metrics (e.g., increased queues, bounce rates).
- Queue management: During a severe outage, pausing or throttling your email queues to the affected ISP (like Orange) is often recommended to prevent further issues and preserve sender reputation.
- Phased resumption: When an ISP signals that the outage is resolving, it is advisable to resume email sending gradually rather than at full throttle immediately, allowing their systems to stabilize.
- Communication: Maintaining open communication with the ISP's postmaster team and relevant communities can provide real-time status updates and guidance.
Key considerations
- Impact on deliverability: Continued sending into a downed ISP can lead to higher bounce rates, potential blacklisting (or blocklisting), and long-term damage to your domain and IP reputation.
- Monitoring tools: Implement robust monitoring tools to track delivery rates, bounce codes, and queue sizes to quickly identify anomalies indicating an outage.
- Proactive measures: Ensure your email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is properly configured, as ISPs rely on these for filtering, especially during system stresses. More information can be found on solving deliverability problems with Orange.fr.
- ISP-specific nuances: Each ISP may have specific protocols or preferred methods for handling outages. Familiarize yourself with these, such as best practices for setting email domain connection limits.
What email marketers say
Email marketers and deliverability professionals often face immediate challenges during ISP outages. Their primary concerns revolve around mitigating delivery failures, preserving sender reputation, and ensuring business continuity. The discussion in the community highlights varied experiences and approaches when an ISP like Orange.fr experiences a significant service disruption.
Key opinions
- Proactive pausing: Many marketers advocate for immediately pausing email queues to the affected ISP upon notification of a serious incident, even if initial delivery attempts appear to succeed.
- Monitoring variations: Some marketers observe that while an outage is reported, their own systems might still be delivering a significant volume of mail, indicating varied impact or a resolving issue.
- Official confirmation: There's a strong preference for waiting for official confirmation from the ISP before resuming full sending, even if metrics seem to improve.
- Gradual resumption: The consensus suggests gradually increasing sending volume after an outage is declared resolved to avoid overwhelming the recovering systems and ensure stable deliverability.
Key considerations
- Internal communication: Clearly communicate email delivery status to internal teams and potentially to affected users if the outage significantly impacts critical communications, following advice on how to convey an email outage to users.
- Reputation risk: Sending large volumes of emails into an ISP that is experiencing an outage can result in emails being blocked or throttled even after the outage, potentially leading to a blocklist listing.
- Traffic patterns: Consider your typical traffic volume to the affected ISP. Low traffic might mean less impact or a quicker recovery for your specific sending.
- Sender behavior: How you manage your queues and respond during an outage can significantly affect your sender reputation with that ISP in the long run.
Email marketer from Email Geeks appreciates the timely notification and seeks additional details about the incident to better understand its scope and potential impact on their operations.
Email marketer from Spiceworks Community suggests that a clear, concise message should be sent to users, indicating that technical issues are causing email services to be down, and that updates will follow.
What the experts say
Deliverability experts closely monitor ISP performance and share real-time insights during outages. Their perspectives often focus on systemic impacts, best practices for senders, and the underlying causes or resolution processes. During the Orange outage, expert discussions centered on verifying the incident's severity and advising on appropriate sending adjustments.
Key opinions
- Immediate action: Experts advise pausing queues to affected ISPs immediately during a serious incident, as continued sending will likely be futile and harmful.
- Information gathering: It's important to gather as much information as possible about the outage, including its estimated start time and scope, to inform response strategies.
- Varying impact: Experts note that the impact of an outage can vary between different Email Service Providers (ESPs), with some experiencing issues while others report normal delivery.
- Post-outage resumption: After an official resolution announcement, experts recommend a gradual resumption of sending, allowing the ISP's infrastructure to fully recover.
Key considerations
- Reputation implications: Continued aggressive sending into a broken system can lead to severe blocklist implications and long-term reputation damage, necessitating careful management of your IP and domain reputation.
- ISP communication: Establishing a direct line of communication with ISP postmaster teams is vital for receiving accurate status updates and guidance.
- Incident tracking: Monitoring public forums and communities for discussions on current outages provides valuable peer-reported information.
- Network stability: Acknowledging that some outages, like the Orange Spain RIPE account hack, can stem from external security incidents impacting network stability is crucial for understanding the unpredictability of such events. Further details can be found on SecurityWeek's report.
Deliverability expert from Email Geeks warns the community about a serious incident at Orange, advising to pause email queues because nothing should be delivering anyway, signaling a complete service disruption.
Deliverability expert from SpamResource states that during a major ISP outage, the best course of action is to stop sending mail to that domain entirely, as continuing to send will only fill their queues and risk further throttling once the outage is resolved.
What the documentation says
Official documentation and research papers provide foundational knowledge on how ISPs manage their networks, handle email traffic, and what can lead to outages. This technical context is crucial for understanding the root causes of delivery interruptions and implementing resilient email strategies.
Key findings
- Authentication standards: ISPs heavily rely on email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to identify legitimate senders and filter out malicious traffic. Proper configuration is essential for reliable delivery, especially during network stress.
- Dynamic IP addresses: Some ISPs periodically renumber dynamic IP addresses, which can indirectly affect deliverability if senders are not prepared for such changes or if the ISP's reputation system links issues to IP rather than domain.
- Security incidents: Major outages can stem from security breaches, such as hacking incidents affecting core network infrastructure, highlighting the vulnerability of even large ISPs.
- Network load management: ISPs manage traffic load through various mechanisms, and an outage can quickly lead to system overloads, exacerbating delivery issues.
Key considerations
- SPF authentication: As Orange utilizes SPF for email authentication, ensuring your SPF records are correctly configured is a fundamental step in maintaining good standing and deliverability, even during normal operations.
- Outage reporting: Familiarize yourself with an ISP's official outage reporting channels, as these provide the most accurate and up-to-date information directly from the source.
- Underlying causes: While immediate action is necessary, understanding the underlying cause of an outage (e.g., hardware failure, software bug, cyberattack) can help anticipate recovery times and potential long-term impacts on deliverability.
- Long-term strategies: Beyond immediate responses, review your overall email deliverability strategy, including authentication setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and list hygiene, to build resilience against future disruptions.
Documentation from University of Email highlights that Orange uses Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to authenticate emails, emphasizing the importance of proper SPF configuration to ensure deliverability to Orange.fr domains.
Documentation from SecurityWeek reports that Orange Spain experienced a major internet outage due to its RIPE account being hacked, likely through stolen credentials, demonstrating that cyberattacks can cause significant ISP disruptions.
