I’ve been working on a document discussing laws relevant to email delivery and have found some useful websites about laws in different countries.
US Laws from the FTC website.
European Union Laws from the European Law site.
Two documents on United Kingdom Law from the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Data Protection Laws
Canadian Laws from the Industry Canada website.
Australian Laws from the Australian Law website
On the heels of JDs post about building relationships with ISPs, many of our Abacus customers and our ISP contacts have been commenting that boxes of meat are always welcome.
Please, remember to send them boxes of meat.
Meat may not get your email delivered, but it will make the ISPs remember you fondly.
Through my position here at Word to the Wise I’ve interacted with dozens of companies over the years. Some companies outsource the mechanics of email sending to email service providers, others buy a software or MTA solution from one of the many vendors out there. For both these groups delivery problems are usually issues with permission or user expectations. Technically there are few problems with sending, bounce handling, unsubscriptions and rate limiting. The commercial software, either as created by an ESP or a vendor, typically does these things well.
The last group, those who use a home built system, are a whole different story. They often do no bounce processing relying on the underlying mail transport agent (typically qmail) to do all that work. The problem is that a general mail transport agent handles bounces for a particular email send, but does not have any functionality to handle future emails to addresses that bounce. Consequently the list does not get bounce handled, dead addresses pile up and their delivery rates plummet.
A few weeks ago Derek talked about senders using homegrown email systems and the pitfalls therein. He has a good list of things companies should think of before deciding a home grown system is right for them.
Al Iverson comments on information from Craig Spiezel at the Exacttarget customer conference this week. Craig confirms that MSN/Hotmail is also looking at user engagement, opens and moving mail out of the spam folder as part of their delivery metrics.
Read More