Overusing ISP contacts

I’ve written frequently about personal contacts at ISPs and how the vast majority of delivery problems can be solved without picking up the “Bat Phone” and having someone at the ISP do something. Al touches on the same subject today, blogging about his recent experiences having to contact “Barry” multiple times for many different issues.
Al resolves

My goal going forward is this: I will not reach out to an individual person at an ISP more than once every two months or so, if I can at all help it. If I’m contacting them more than that, then something is broken, and that broken something is probably on my side of things. All of the big ISPs have published processes that work fine for almost any eventuality. That’s why those processes exist, to help people sending mail work through any issues observed.

As I said in my The Secret To Dealing with ISPs post, the vast majority of issues can be handled on the sender side without involvement of anyone at the ISP.
Related Posts:
Delivery Emergencies
Troubleshooting Yahoo Delivery
Following The Script
Deliverability Emergencies from the ISP Side of the Desk

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The secret to dealing with ISPs

What is the secret to dealing with ISPs?
The short answer is: Don’t do it if at all possible. Talking to ISP reps generally isn’t going to magically improve your reptuation.  There is no place in the reputation systems where delivery can be modified because the delivery specialist knows or is liked by the postmaster at an ISP.
With my clients, I work through delivery issues and can solve 80 – 90% of the issues without ever having to contact anyone at the ISPs. 90% of the remaining issues can be handled using the publicly available contacts and websites provided by the ISPs.
In the remaining cases, the “secret” to getting useful and prompt replies is to:

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Problems at Excite

I’ve been chasing an intermittent and inconsistent delivery problem at Excite for a week or so. Excite is accepting email, but mail is not getting to the recipient’s inbox or bulk folder. Al tweeted he’s seeing a similar problem with his customers’ mail and had contacted Excite.
Excite does appear to be aware of the issue, but I have no ETA on a fix.
EDIT: Comments are closed

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Confirmed opt-in

I spent the morning in multiple venues correcting mis-understandings of confirmed opt-in. The misunderstandings weren’t so much that people didn’t understand how COI works, but more they didn’t understand all the implications.
In one venue, the conversation centered around how small a portion of deliverability the initial subscription process affects. Sure, sending unwanted, unexpected email can and does cause reputation problems, but merely using COI as a subscription methodolgy doesn’t automatically give a sender a good reputation or good delivery. Senders using COI as a subscription practice need to also need to send relevant and engaging mail that their recipients expect to receive. They need to handle their bounces well and purge or re-engage inactive subscribers. They need to keep their complaints low and their responses high.
How you manage subscriptions is only one factor in reputation schemes, and even if the subscription method is COI other factors can negate any bonus involved.
The second conversation involved Ken challenging me on the comment I left on his quiz yesterday. I said COI wasn’t foolproof and he challenged me to explain how. I did, and he’ll be following up next week.

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