What the heck is RFC Compliant?
You must be trying to get whitelisted, because nobody really cares about RFC compliancy unless you are a spammer or trying to get whitelisted. For the average user, RFC compliancy is a non-issue.
I compose the email, I send the email, the email is received. Done and done.
For the spammer email marketer, RFC compliancy is very important. It means that your email message complies with the rules and regulations set forth in the RFC 2822. RFC 2822 is a very long document, which I can boil down to a few points that are relevant to email marketers:
- Don’t mess with To:, From:, CC:, BCC:, Subject: lines. Big no-no. The recipient has to know where this message came from and that you are indeed the sender. No cloaking or other nastiness.
- You must specify your real address. If you are a company, this has to be the company address. If you are an individual working as a company, same deal.
- You must give them, your recipients, a method to unsubscribe, whether it’s phone, fax, email, web page, or smoke signal and it has to be “relatively” easy to complete the process, which means no jumping through 25 hoops to get off a mailing list.
Got it? Now go play nice with the children.
1 Comment so far
Leave a reply
I see your point, in the sense that complying with a standard does not necessarily determines whether something works or not. However, standards were created to guarantee that 2 applications can speak the same language and ensure data gets from side to side properly.
On top of that, your points 2 and 3 are completely irrelevant to what the RFC is. I would rather qualify those are e-mail ethics or perhaps laws in some countries.
So the fact that scammers are trying to comply with the e-mail standard does not really diminish the importance of standard protocols. In addition, RFC compliance is only a small part of the set of rules most spam filters use; Things like word and sentence structure, network sources and black lists play a much larger role in the process.