The Question

Mark Brownlow has a list of 12 questions every email marketer should ask about their marketing program. Buried in the middle is the most important question for delivery.

Do you worry more about what ISPs think about your email than what subscribers think about your email? If you take care of the latter, won’t the former take care of itself?

My answer is if a sender is worried more about what the ISPs think than what subscribers think that sender is going to have ongoing and continual delivery problem. However, if a sender focuses on sending relevant, expected and wanted email then they will have almost zero delivery problems.

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Botnets

Terry Zink has been posting articles about botnets as traced by Hotmail. I do not often talk about botnets as they are outside my area of expertise. They are not something I deal with, as no one who uses botnets is welcome as a client here.
My clients and I, however, do have to deal with the fallout from botnets.  Because of botnets, receiver ISPs are extremely suspicious of mail from any IP address that they have not seen mail from previously. Mail from new IPs is, more often than not, a newly infected Windows machine. This results in mail from new IPs not starting with a reputation of zero but starting with a negative reputation.
Botnets are another example of spammers making it more difficult for mailers with permission to use email.

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Report spam button broken

Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa published a press release today about how fundamentally broken the “report spam” button is. They call for ISPs to make changes to fix the problem. I think the study on recipient perceptions is useful and timely. There is an ongoing fundamental paradigm shift in how ISPs are handling email filters. ISPs are learning how to measure a senders collective reputation with end users, and, more importantly integrate that reputation into the equation used to determine how to filter and deliver incoming email.
Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa acknowledge this change in the report:

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The overlooked secret of marketing

Seth Godin posted recently about the overlooked secret of marketing: time

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