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Direct Mail:Product rules

Last Updated:Dec 26, 2022

Email types supported by DirectMail

  • Triggered emails: Emails triggered by events, such as registration or transaction notifications, password retrieval emails, system alarms, or other system notification emails.

  • Batch emails: Subscription emails sent to members, such as product promotions, customer care emails, or periodical news and updates.

Note:

  • Triggered mail can only be sent through API or SMTP, and batch mail can be sent through all methods.

  • Alibaba Cloud only allows sending commercial emails permitted by the recipients. The source of the recipient addresses must be the member registration information, and the email content must be subscribed to by the recipients explicitly. Alibaba Cloud does not allow unauthorized sending of emails or spam emails.

  • Carefully read the DirectMail terms of service section of the Alibaba Cloud International Website Product Terms of Service, before you use the DirectMail service.

Permission requirements for mail content

  • Email content shall not contain sensitive words, WeChat, QQ, QR code, group information, Facebook, online disk and other social and resource sharing information.

  • The body of the email should include the user's honorific title, detailed compliance information, and a true and effective unsubscribe link.

  • Email content that does not meet the requirements of 1 and 2 above shall not be sent;

About the DirectMail platform, describe the messages allowed to be sent

  • First of all, the email content should not contain sensitive words, such as reactionary, obscene, abusive, insulting language, etc;

  • Secondly, it is required that the recipients themselves register and actively subscribe to the email on your website, such as regular discount promotion of stores concerned by e-commerce platform stores, job recommendations after registration on recruitment websites, and other information that users actively register and pay attention to subscriptions;

  • The relevant recipient has no actual contact with your company, but your company obtains the contact address of the recipient through other channels, so as to send unilateral cooperative promotion emails to non members or non registered users or without the user's permission. This type of email can be called development letters, and is prohibited from sending;

  • If the recipient is your cooperative customer, you need to improve the customer information in the email, and add unsubscribe and customer address at the same time. Please note that in this case, once the recipient complains about your email information to us, we will freeze the email address corresponding to this email information and all the email addresses under your Alibaba Cloud account in the region to which it belongs. After the freeze, the console Direct Mail in this region cannot be used normally;

  • In principle, emails that do not meet the requirements of 1 and 2 above are prohibited from sending;

Note: The above required unsubscribe links or unsubscribe shall be handled by the client.

Implementation principle of unsubscribe service

The unsubscribe service is generally grown in the user system. Each time a user sends an email, it contains a special unsubscribe link, which contains the email of the recipient. When the customer clicks this link, the request will go to your unsubscribe service, and the recipient you resolve will be removed from your sending address.

Credit rating rules

Direct Mail establishes a dynamic reputation rating system based on the email delivery quality (arrival rate, invalid address rate, and spam rate) of Alibaba Cloud users. The credit rating is automatically adjusted by the system. For more information, see the following rules.

Credit grades

After an Alibaba Cloud account is activated and used to log on, different Aliyun accounts will be assigned to different credit levels according to the Aliyun User Level, and the lowest initial credit is Grade 2. This corresponds to a quota of 2,000 emails/day. The highest credit grade is 16, and the corresponding daily quota is 10 million emails /day.

You can view the status, credit level, daily quota and monthly quota of your account on the Direct Mail console Overview page.

The correspondence between the credit grade and the daily quota is as follows:

Credit grade

Daily quota (emails)

Grade 1

500

Grade 2

2,000

Grade 3

5,000

Grade 4

8,000

Grade 5

10,000

Grade 6

20,000

Grade 7

50,000

Grade 8

100,000

Grade 9

200,000

Grade 10

500,000

Grade 11

800,000

Grade 12

1,000,000

Grade 13

2,000,000

Grade 14

5,000,000

Grade 15

8,000,000

Grade 16

10,000,000

Grading rules

The Direct Mail evaluates the email delivery quality (arrival rate, invalid address rate, spam rate, etc.) of Alibaba Cloud users in real time, upgrades the reputation level for high-quality users, and demotion penalties for poor-quality users. The time interval for real-time detection is 1 to 2 minutes. The upgrade and downgrade rules are as follows:

Automatic promotion mechanism:

  • The upper limit ranges from level 9 to level 16. The number of automatic increases for a single account ranges from 1 to 4 per day, which does not exceed the credit level limit set by users.

  • The amount of mail sent is greater than 300, the daily activity reaches the full limit or is close to the full limit (more than 70% of the daily limit), the invalid address rate is less than 5%, the spam rate (including the number of failed emails rejected by the recipient due to SPAM and the number of spam reports) is lower than 2.5%, and the success rate is higher than 92%, which will improve your reputation level and daily limit.

  • If the quota cannot meet your daily needs for sending emails, you can contact us with a work order to adjust it separately, and manual promotion is allowed at most once a day.

Automatic degradation mechanism:

  • If you have data for at least three days a week and the average daily emails volume is greater than 300, the invalid address rate is higher than 9%, or the spam rate is higher than 10%, or the success rate is lower than 65%, which will affect your credit rating evaluation and reduce your daily and monthly quotas.

  • After a user with a reputation level of 1 is downgraded, Alibaba Cloud will restrict email sending outside this account.

The Direct Mail product has the right to adjust the above rules and values according to the actual situation of the system.

Account ban rules

Freeze the account from sending outgoing emails

Frozen accounts can log on to the DirectMail console, but they cannot use DirectMail to send emails.

In the following conditions, the account is frozen:

  • The arrival quality on a single day is too low. the number of outgoing mail is more than 300, the invalid address rate is higher than 11%,or the spam rate is higher than 15%, or the arrival rate is 0.

  • A Grade 1 account is further downgraded.

An account can be unfrozen once. You must open a support ticket to unfreeze the account.

You can view your user status on the DirectMail console overview page.

Ban the account

Banned accounts cannot log on to the DirectMail console and they cannot use DirectMail to send emails.

DirectMail will ban the account if the account is detected sending emails including but not limited to the following types:

  • Phishing, fraud, or virus-infected emails.

  • Emails that are suspected of being involved in overregistration.

  • Emails that receive complaints from third parties due to a large number of spam emails being sent, that damage the reputation of DirectMail, or that have other adverse impacts.

Account bans take effect immediately and are permanent (that is, banned accounts cannot be re-entered into the system).

Note: DirectMail retains the right to adjust the aforementioned rules and values according to actual system situations.

Set the credit level threshold

You can set the credit level threshold on the Overview page of the Direct Mail console. After settings, you can avoid excessive consumption caused by malicious use of the website, resulting in a sudden increase in the number of emails.

The highest credit grade is 10 by default. The highest credit level you set cannot be lower than the highest credit level you currently have.

When the threshold is reached, the system will not increase your credit grade until you set a higher credit grade ceiling.