What is a mitigation & what does it do? The mitigation process in its entirety

By Julia, Deliverability Expert

If you’ve sent emails on our platform & encountered deliverability issues, I am sure you’ve heard our email team say “I’ll put in a mitigation request for that & let you know if I hear back.”

…So, what does that entail?

We are going to quickly review what goes into a mitigation request & what follows the submission.

Let’s begin.

When we set up your domain for sending, we enroll in feedback loops that are in place to deliver an error message when we experience deliverability issues. These messages are supposed to help us determine which blocklist may be affecting our domain or IP.

Once we have located our block, there are resources provided by that specific server or blocklist on how to go about resolving our issues. In some cases, the only thing to do is stop sending to certain servers for a bit; lower level blocklists do not always offer mitigation but rather they have volume limits or temporary rate-limiting for a period of time. These are less concerning and do not require further action aside from resting your domain/IP briefly.

In the case that there is a form or email that requests can be submitted to, you will usually need to do so in order to resolve or lift the block.

These forms ask for a variety of details including but not limited to:

• Company facts (address, phone, website, business type, etc.)
• An email address that has successfully delivered with your messages previously
• Details on the communication and itself (newsletter, marketing, etc.)
• What you think may have caused the block & what you have done to prevent in future
• Any company issues that may have caused the issue (a broken program, any rogue employee actions, etc.)

Once we have filled out these forms, we are at the mercy of the server or blocklist. Some respond within an hour or a day or so, some never respond, and some (like Google) could take up to 2 weeks to even review your request.

Unless we receive a direct response, it is important to test deliverability periodically to see if our block was resolved without sending over confirmation.

It is important to avoid submitting too many or too frequent requests, as every request is monitored and generally tracked by your domain or IP. With this, we should maintain the submission of detailed mitigation requests and track our submissions to avoid overdoing them.

We understand blocks can be frustrating & that some are nearly impossible to resolve. That is why this is only the first step in our process to resolution; our email team has plenty other tricks up our sleeve if our requests should fail.