Email Marketing News and Tips

You’re probably asking, “What is network throttling and network countermeasures?  What does all this have to do with email marketing?”  That’s a very good question and that will be the focus of this blog article today.

Network Throttling

Network throttling, also known as Traffic Shaping, is a mechanism that slows down traffic coming from any IP addresses at ‘too fast’ of a rate. Keep in mind that the ‘rate’ threshhold is set by the administrator over the network in question.  Such throttling can happen in various ways:

1. Number of connections (per second, per minute, simultaneous or all of the above)
2. Number of packets per second
3. Number of connection attempts over a period of time
4. Other metrical or statstical analysis of packets or connections

Network Countermeasures

The ultimate effect of network throttling is to use network countermeasures to slow down the traffic by various means including delayed responses, disconnection, resets or outright temporary blacklist (no responses at all).

What’s the reason behind this?

Many sites have limited amount of bandwidth, server resources and other limited computing resources.  As such, these resources are generally dedicated to and given priority for local use.  That means, the site wants to give the benefit of these computer resources to the local users rather than remote services that have no affiliation.  As a result, network administrators are often tasked to make sure these resources are available to local users over the priority of non-local parties.  This is often called Quality of Service (QoS).

Quality of Service

QoS is not just a term used to improve the quality of service to end users, but it is also a technical approach to how to dole out network resources to those tasks and services that need it most and limit those who need it least.  For example, video conferencing or Voice Over IP (VoIP) is important in some companies.  These protocols generally send their video and audio data over the Internet or other network lines.  These packets need to arrive timely in order to prevent glitchy and unusable video and audio.  As such, network equipment can detect these packets and give priority to routing these packets first over other network traffic.  This QoS prevents the glitchy problematic behavior when you’re doing video conferencing or voice telephony.

This quality of service methodology can be applied on a full time basis or during specific times of the day when traffic is busiest.

How does this affect email?

Just as with the video conferencing example above, email relies on the Internet to provide delivery of emails to third parties. However, as an Email Service Provider, Boomerang sends the email marketing campaigns using a lot more servers and with a lot more speed than many receiving email servers can handle.   Thus, some systems have implemented network throttling to manage how fast we can send email to their server.  If Boomerang reaches a given threshhold (that Boomerang is usually unaware of), the email may be slowed or it may be denied delivery.

Once Boomerang identifies any such network throttling and countermeasures, we can implement a methodology to slow down the delivery to a more manageable rate to any individual domain.  Usually, network countermeasures slow down delivery more substantially than when Boomerang implements our slowing methodology.

The reason this is important is that Boomerang, and every email service provider, wants to make sure that we are not overloading other people’s equipment in the process of sending email.  We always want to ensure we provide the best quality service to our customers and, at the same time, to not negatively impact servers where we send email.  By playing friendly with all of our network neighbors (and their equipment), we improve our deliverability.

As an email marketer, you will want to make sure that the Email Service Provider you choose allows for such implementation to allow for the best and widest range delivery available today.