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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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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Delivery emergencies

There is no such thing as a delivery emergency. They just do not happen.
Delivery is fluid, delivery is changing, delivery is complex.
But when delivery goes bad it is not an emergency. There is no need to call up an ISP person at home on a Saturday afternoon and ask them to remove the filters. (And, BTW, experience indicates if you do this that you may have future delivery issues at that ISP.)
I’m sure that people will provide me with examples of delivery emergencies. And, in some cases I might even concede that the receivers will be happy to receive email immediately when it was sent. However, email as a protocol was designed for store and forward. It was not designed to transmit messages instantaneously from sender to receiver. Sure, it works that way much of the time these days. On the whole the Internet is fairly reliable and major servers are connected 24/7 (which wasn’t always the case).
Among many people, particularly recipients and ISP employees, there isn’t the expectation that bulk email is instantaneous. This leads to the belief that delivery problems are not an emergency. Everyone faces them, they get dealt with, life goes on. Demanding an escalation to deal with a “delivery emergency” may backfire and slow down how long it takes to get a response from an ISP.

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The Weekend Effect

Sending mail only Monday through Friday can cause reputation and delivery problems at some ISPs, even when senders are doing everything right. This “weekend effect” is a consequence of how ISPs measure reputation over time.
Most ISPs calculating complaint rate use a simple calculation. They measure how many “this is spam” clicks a source IP generates in a 24 hour period. Then they divide that number by how many emails were delivered to the inbox in the same 24 hour period.
The weekend effect happens when a sender sends on weekdays and not on the weekend thus lowering the number of emails delivered to the to the inbox. Recipients, however, still read mail on the weekend, and they still hit the “this is spam” button on the email. Even if the number of “this is spam” clicks is lower than a normal weekday, with no incoming email the rate of spam complaints goes above ISP thresholds. Even a very well run mailing program may see spikes in complaint rate on the weekends.
Now, when the ISPs are measuring complaint rates over time, they take the average of the average complaint rates. If the rates spike high enough on the weekend (and they can spike to the 1 – 3% range, even for a well run list), that can hurt the senders’ reputation.
The good news is that ISPs are aware of the weekend effect and take this into account when manually looking at complaints. The bad news is that not all of the major ISPs take this into account when programatically calculating reputation.
There isn’t very much senders can do to combat the weekend effect, except be aware this can happen and may be responsible for poor mailing performances on Monday. If you are seeing delivery problems you think may be a result of the weekend effect you can contact the ISPs and ask for manual review of your reputation. Some ISPs can provide manual mitigation for senders with otherwise clean stats. d

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