Tencent QQ is a leading Chinese instant messaging service and web portal created by Tencent. Its email service QQMail competes with NetEase as one of the largest email providers in China.
Infrastructure
Region |
Asia Pacific (APAC): China |
Domains |
qq.com; vip.qq.com; foxmail.com |
Connection and throughput |
QQMail does not disclose connection and throughput limits. The general throughput guideline for a Chinese mailbox provider is to send no more than 4000 messages per hour for each IP address. The volume of messages allowed by QQMail servers may vary depending on your sending reputation and other factors. |
Complaint feedback loop (FBL) application |
QQMail has a Report and Feedback service for subscriber complaints. |
Postmaster site |
Deliverability best practices and troubleshooting support
- Use opt-in permission methods for all subscribers. Do not purchase email lists or engage in list harvesting from third-party websites.
- Have a list hygiene strategy in place to remove or suppress unknown and unengaged users from your email list.
- Ensure you follow QQMail's sending guidelines.
- Configure all IPs with valid reverse DNS (PTR) records.
- Authenticate all email with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
- Implement a prominent unsubscribe link in all email with a one-click unsubscribe process and immediately honor all unsubscribe requests.
- Implement the list-unsubscribe header in all email. QQMail uses the mailto: list-unsubscribe header to process unsubscribe requests.
- Monitor domain performance and sign up with QQMail's complaint feedback loop service. Suppress subscribers that complain. QQMail blocks or throttles mail with high complaint levels.
- Monitor QQMail SMTP response codes when encountering delivery issues. The SMTP response codes provide additional information to help you troubleshoot.
- If you receive SMTP response codes indicating you are exceeding connection and throughput limits, reduce the number of connections, email volume, and increase retry times until the messages are no longer received.
- Send relevant and timely email to subscribers. QQMail uses complaints, read rates, delete rates, and other engagement metrics to determine if a subscriber wants to receive email. Email campaigns with low engagement metrics are likely to be filtered as spam.
- QQMail relies on content-based filtering.
- Ensure you have "AD" in your subject line so recipients understand the purpose of your email. Marketing email without "AD" in the subject line is likely to be filtered as spam.
- Remove content with culturally insensitive words or phrases and any content related to illegal drugs, weapons, and pornography. Some politically sensitive topics may also cause your email to be filtered as spam or blocked.
- Ensure your content is not associated with or contains viruses and malware.
- Make sure the message subject line matches the message content.
- Use a combination of images and text in your email as QQMail does not display images by default. Image-only email is likely to be filtered as spam.
- QQMail does not disclose which blocklists are used in filtering decisions, but you should ensure that your IP addresses and domains are not listed on any important blocklists.
- Use the same IP address or block of IP addresses and a consistent sending address to make it easier for QQMail to identify you.
- Ensure that the envelope From (MFrom or Return-path) and header From (From:) fields are the same.
- Ensure that your email complies with the Request for Comment (RFC) 2821 and 2822 specification protocols.
- Deploy different mailstreams (e.g. transactional and marketing mail) from different IP addresses and From addresses . QQMail tries to deliver transactional email to the inbox. However, some transactional messages may be identified as spam, especially when seen with inconsistent sending behavior.
Mediation
- QQMail does not have a public mediation process.