Zombie email: Part 1

Zombie email addresses: those email addresses that never really die, eat your brains and destroy your email delivery. To understand zombie addresses and why they’re just now becoming a problem, we really need to understand some of the history of email addresses.
In the early days of the net, people got an email address usually associated directly with their access to the Internet. Many of them ended with .edu or .gov. I even had one that ended in .BITNET for a while. The first ISPs followed this convention. Users signed up for an account at a local dialup and were assigned an email address, and that was their email address. It wasn’t until the late 1990’s where there was widespread access to multiple email addresses.
What this means is that when people left a job, or canceled their Internet access their email address went away. Addresses that were abandoned would, after a short period of time, start bouncing back with user unknown, giving everyone the opportunity to stop mailing that account.
Even with the advent of multiple addresses for a single account and the easy availability of free addresses from places like Hotmail addresses that had been abandoned would still bounce off a list. Why? Because accounts had limited storage. My first dialup account had, I think, 10MB of space. It may have been as much as 20MB, but it wasn’t very much. Accounts receiving a lot of mail that weren’t checked frequently would fill up and start bouncing mail. Senders would be able to remove abandoned accounts because they were full.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about two things happened in the early 2000’s that changed email and led to the rise of zombie email.
Zombie Email: Part 2
Zombie Email: Part 3
Zombie Apocalypse

Related Posts

Link roundup June 18, 2010

Hotmail has released a new version of their software with some changes. Return Path discusses the changes in depth, but there are a couple that senders may find helpful.

Read More

How not to build a mailing list

I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

Read More

Improving the email interface

Want an improved email interface? Then build it.
There’s been an ongoing discussion about adding thumbs up / thumbs down style buttons to email clients. While I am dubious this is a useful feature or something that recipients will use, if there are others in the industry that think it would be useful then I strongly suggest they go ahead and create it.
In fact, there are a couple things that have been asked for in email interfaces that aren’t currently provided. Last October I blogged about adding an unsubscribe button to email clients.

Read More