Delivery delays due to congestion

Now that we’re deep in the middle of the Christmas shopping season, I’m seeing more and more complaints about delays at ISPs. Mickey talked about everything the ISPs have to consider when making hardware and buildout decisions in his post The hard truth about email on Spamtacular. When, like on cyber Monday, there’s a sharp increase in the volume of email, sometimes ISPs don’t have the capacity to accept all the email that is thrown at them.

ISPs and other receivers build their data centers with the needs of their customers in mind, and you are usually not their customer. When every relative your customer has wants to send mail inviting them to Christmas dinner (all at the same time) and you and every other marketer in the world want to send them mail inviting them to shop at your all-important sale (all at the same time), it overloads the available capacity of your customer’s ISP. While they do build their systems (more or less) robustly and with many normal, seasonal surges in mind, you have to understand that sometimes something happens that means that your email will not arrive instantaneously.

Al Iverson tweeted yesterday alluding to the same complaint from one of his customers.

Hey, don’t yell at your ESP when we can’t make ISP X accept your mail faster…. we don’t run the entire universe yet.

There are certain bits of delivery a sender or ESP can control, and there are some things a sender or ESP can’t control. Capacity at the ISPs is one thing a sender can’t control, and when everyone is sending mail at the same time, everyone is going to see delays.
One commentor on that Spamtacular post claimed that anti-spam was “a racket” and that there were simple solutions to the spam problem. In response to that comment, Annalivia wrote an detailed rebuttal, talking about exactly what was happening on the ISP side of the fence.

ISPs are laying people off right and left. The premise of allowing spam to flow just to justify the purchase of expensive new toys is nonsense. It takes money to buy additional appliances to handle the overhead of unwanted email. ISPs don’t *have* that money. Mickey’s original post was all about the reasons why email is sometimes delayed. One of those reasons is the lack of sufficient resources to handle the flow. Why are those resources lacking? NO MONEY. There’s a major economic crisis going on […]

Email marketing may be one area that isn’t being hit hard by the current state of the economy. But the ISPs are struggling, and expecting them to invest money they don’t have so that marketers can have instantaneous email delivery is folly.
There will be delivery problems due to network congestion and too much mail for ISPs to handle. Marketers can’t do anything about this except send mail and wait for it to be delivered. In an ideal world there would be sufficient resources for all. We don’t live in an ideal world, and in the cooperative environment of the Internet, everyone has to be respectful of the resource limitations of everyone else.

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Senders need to take responsibility

Having just returned home from another conference, my head is full of new ideas, new thoughts and new projects. I enjoy seeing old friends, making new contacts and sharing ideas. One thing I don’t enjoy, though, is listening to senders and marketers complaining about how hard it is to be a sender because the ISPs will not tell them what standards they need to meet.
If the ISPs would just tell us what they want us to do, we’ll do it.

The ISPs have told senders what they want them to do. They want senders to stop sending mail that their users don’t want. It is a very simple statement.
Stop sending spam.

For many senders, however, it’s not enough. “Tell us exactly what we need to do to stop sending spam. What complaint rates must we be under? What bounce rates do we have to be under? How do you want us to do this?” By this point in the conversation the ISP person is mentally rolling their eyes and looking for a way to escape the conversation.
The ISPs don’t want to tell senders how to behave, they want senders to start behaving. Stop sending spam should be all they need to tell senders.
Senders who ask for ISPs to tell them how to stop sending mail recipients think is spam are looking for specific thresholds they can stay under. They’re not really interested in actually sending wanted mail, they’re interested in sending good-enough mail, where good-enough mail is simply mail that gets to the inbox.
Want to know why ISPs don’t think much of many senders? Because the senders are not visibly taking any stand against abuse. I know there are a lot of senders out there who stop a lot of spam from ever leaving their systems, but there’s also a lot of unwanted mail that goes out, too. Some of that mail is even spam by any definition of the word. All the ISPs can see is the spam that gets through, and then they hear just tell us what to do and we’ll do it. From an ISP perspective, this means the senders only care about the thresholds and getting in under the ISPs’ radars.
Senders need to take more responsibility for the mail that goes out over their networks.
What do I mean by this? I mean senders need to stop waiting for the ISPs to define good practices. Senders need to implement standards and good practices just because they’re good practices, not because the ISPs are dictating the practices. Senders need to stop customers from doing bad things, and dump them if they won’t stop. Senders need to stop relying on ISPs for specific answers to why mail is being blocked. Senders need to take responsibility for the mail going across their networks.
It’s time for senders to grow up and stop relying on others for guidance. They shouldn’t implement good practices just because the ISPs tell them to, but instead should implement good practices because they are good practices.

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Listen to Barry.
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