Email Delivery in China

What Governs Deliverability in China

• Heavy government involvement in the form of:
  • Censorship
  • Surveillance
• Slow sending speeds - general sending speed recommendations for all Chinese ISPs is 4k/hr/IP
• Content filtering
  • Adult content, gambling, tobacco, illegal drugs
• Few publicly offered feedback loops
• DKIM used infrequently in China
• Chinese Mailbox Providers:
  • Netease: 126.com, 163.com, yeah.net
  • Tencent: qq.com,vip.qq.com, foxmail.com
  • Sina: sina.com, sina.com.cn, vip.sina.com.cn, sina.net
  • Sohu: sohu.com, sohu.cn, sogou.com, chinaren.com, sohu.net
  • Tom.com: tom.com, vip.tom.com, 163.net, tom.com.hk
  • AliCloud: aliyun.com
• Chinese Telco-based Email Addresses:
  • China Unicom (中国联通) - wo.com.cn, m165.com
  • China Mobile (中国移动) - 139.com
  • China Telecom (中国电信) - 189.cn

    There are many domains based on branch company locations with different domain names specific to that region. For example, for Zhejiang province mailzj.cn, similar to how RoadRunner structures their email domains like nyc.rr.com.

AD in the Subject Line of Commercial Emails

Chinese antispam legislation indicates that all commercial email must be labeled through the inclusion of "AD". While the Chinese equivalent is acceptable, "AD" is preferred in the subject line.

However, ISPs and ESPs have different viewpoints:

• This regulation was never given further clarification by any government body since the original spam regulations were issued in 2005. It's often seen written as commonly as AD (AD) or [AD] and placed at the beginning or end of the subject line.
• Chinese ISPs view AD use differently, most don't care about it, and largely NetEase is where it matters most.

QQ.com

QQ.com is the largest and the fastest growing of the Chinese Internet service portals. QQ.com filtering methodology is:

• Daily emailing limit - determined by average volume of last 60 days and IP reputation
• Reputation is based on sender accuracy - read rate, delete rate, complaint rate
• To determine daily emailing limit - sign up for QQ's SNDS-like environment at http://open.mail.qq.com/
• QQ filters at IP level, so daily limits can often be increased by adding number of sending IPs

Feedback Loop:

Spam Complaint Feedback System (垃圾邮件举报反馈系统) is a service that allows you to view complaints from QQ users and encourages senders to remove these users from their email lists.

QQ.com deliverability checklist:

• Sign Up for SNDS-like environment to determine the daily emailing limit
• Send slowly

Note Note: Chinese ISPs require slow sending speeds due to infrastructure limitations related to email. General send speed recommendations for all Chinese ISPs are 4k/hr/IP.

Marketing Cloud Engagement Findings

We've found clients whose IPs are enrolled in QQ FBLs do not have as many queuing issues at QQ.com. IPs that are not enrolled tend to be limited to lower volumes and have a shorter window for sending emails around 10am EST each day.

For properly registered IPs with good engagement rates, the amount of email allowed through per IP can be as high as 70k subscribers per day.

For registered IPs that are still triggering frequency blocks, the per day limit seems to fall between 35k to 40k per day. This rate seems to be heavily reputation-related.

Marketing Cloud Engagement has implemented optimized delivery rates for QQ.com across all email sending servers. External factors such as sender reputation, engagement by subscribers with the content being sent, and registration status with the QQ.com FBL determine the volume and speed at which the email can be delivered.

ISP email infrastructure in China is not as robust as large ISPs such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and others. The infrastructure is similar to AOL.com regarding ability to accept email, scale volume, and rejecting due to volume limitations. ISPs in China limit the number of emails that can be sent and also dictate the speed at which that email is to be accepted.

It's not impossible to send emails to China. Following best practices around engagement, and limiting volume to focus only on engaged subscribers helps with challenges to sending to China. Sign up for FBLs and monitoring to gain insight on your sending.