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Bad Idea

My mailbox and IM windows have been swamped with messages about an ISP sending out mail to participants in their FBL program. It seems this particular ISP could use some delivery consulting.
See, this ISP sent out emails with blocks of 50 – 75 email addresses in the To: line. Bad idea. Delivery wise, I do not expect that they had many delivery problems. In the copy I saw, most of the addresses started with “support” and those addresses often have fewer blocks on them than other addresses. I also do not think this ISP will see subscriber emails blocked because of this.
However, it is very, very bad practice to do what they did. And the fact that the ISP can get away with it does not mean that any other mailer can get away with it.

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Roadrunner turns images off by default

Earlier this week DirectMag published an article talking about RoadRunner blocking images by default. I did talk to someone over at RoadRunner and found out a few more details about this change.
What is happening is that RR is rolling out a new web interface. This interface has both a bulk/spam filter and has images disabled by default.
I do not expect sender to notice this change in the open rates of RoadRunner addresses. Most RoadRunner customers use their own mail client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.) and not the RR web interface. The number of uses this change touches is a very small fraction of the RR users.

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Yahoo delays, part 4: Yahoo blogs

Yahoo posted some suggestions about contacting their postmaster group over on the ymail blog.  They also explained what they were doing to solve the problems with response delays.
Some of the problem is being caused by excessive follow-up emails, either because senders did not provide all the necessary information initially or because they are asking why they have not heard anything. Each of these requires more work on the part of Yahoo and throws the queues into further disarray and puts everyone even more behind.
Yahoo asks that people be patient, they are working through things. On their end, they have added more staff to the postmaster team. They also suggest senders can help by providing ALL the information they ask for at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/ before submitting the request. Incomplete requests contribute even more to the backlog as Yahoo employees have to chase down senders to get their full information.

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