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As an ESP (email service provider) for professional artists, there are certain responsibilities we have (both legal and ethical) that are are 100% committed to maintaining, for the sake of all of our customers that are utilizing our email services.
This is because one artist who has purchased an email list, or who has acquired email addresses in a nefarious way (whether intentional or not), can get a sending domain “blocked” and this will impact every other artist that is also sending emails through our service.
Therefore, we have several requirements up front that every artist using our services must know in advance:
Do NOT purchase an email list and do NOT attempt to send emails to this list using our services - if you do this, your account could be immediately and potentially permanently suspended. This is because the recipients on this list did not explicitly sign up for your email list, and are not expecting email from you, and it is not legal for you to be emailing them.
All of your website forms (including anywhere else you may acquire emails from online) must have CAPTCHA implemented - This prevents spambots and other nefarious actors from adding bad emails into your email lists. If these bad emails are able to enter your email list and they are sent emails, they will impact the sender reputation and compromise deliverability of ALL emails sent.
You are agreeing that every person on your current email list, both now and in the future, has explicitly opted in to receiving emails from you - This means you are not sending to any email address that has not explicitly opted-in to receiving email from you.
If you violate one of the above requirements, you will be immediately suspended from using Art Storefronts emailing services.
Our Email Verification Process
It is important to know that we have implemented our own email verification process to prevent new customers or existing customers from violating the above requirements without our knowledge. Before you are able to send any emails, all of your emails will be verified and tested through our internal system. This includes any emails uploaded, or acquired through your forms, or added manually, or entered into your Art Storefronts account through any means.
If any email is found to be unverified for whatever reason, our system will not send an email to that email address.
Other Important Recommendations
In addition to the above, there are some recommendations we can make to ensure maximum deliverability as well as compliance:
Confirming all new email sign-ups
Re-confirming existing mailing lists
Retiring non-responsive subscribers (implementing a sunset policy)
Not using a freemail account (i.e. Gmail, yahoo, aol, Hotmail, etc.) as your sender email address
It is important to know that at any time, we may require you to implement these recommendations, since it is our obligation and responsibility to do so as an Email Service Provider.
Important Information about using "Freemail" as your sender address
It is helpful to be familiar with DMARC (Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) to gain a better understanding of the issues encountered with free email domains and delivery. DMARC is a system for validating incoming emails, which verifies that the domain in the From email address is the same as the domain the email is being sent from. If these domains do not match, the DMARC check fails and the email is not accepted.
DMARC policies also tell receiving servers how to handle emails from a domain that fail the DMARC check. Free email domains usually have policies that instruct the receiving servers to reject emails that fail the DMARC check. These strict policies are in place to stop email scams, but they can also affect the delivery of legitimate marketing content sent through bulk email services such as Copilot.
Very soon, Google will be blocking marketing emails that are sent from a "freemail" sender address (i.e. your personal gmail, yahoo, aol, hotmail, etc. email address). It is already not advised to be using one of these as your sender address, because it will negatively impact your email deliverability. The best solution is to get an email address from your custom domain. For example, if your custom domain is "www.BobsFineArt.com", then you would create an email address such as "bob@bobsfineart.com" and use this as your sender email.
As a result of Google's strictness, as well as the negative deliverability issue, Art Storefronts will no longer allow freemail addresses to be used as sender email addresses as of January 1st, 2024.
How does Art Storefronts help your delivery rates if you are using Freemail?
If you use a free domain that could have delivery issues, we’ll automatically make a small change to your Copilot email address each time we send a Copilot email. All the changes are on our side, so you don't need to do anything.
We’ll use either the artcopilotteam.com or artstorefrontsteam.com subdomains as the From domain for your email address when we send a Copilot email. When receiving servers look at your email, the From email address will match the domain the email is being sent from, so it should pass the DMARC check. Replies from recipients will still go to your From address.
Here’s an example of what a From address could look like with the subdomain added.
Original
bobsfineart@yahoo.com
With ArtStorefront's change
bobsfineart.yahoo.com@artstorefrontsteam.com
It's important to know that this solution can't fix all email deliverability issues. Choosing to get an email address from your custom domain is the best solution, and it means that Art Storefronts won't make any changes to your Copilot emails From address.