ArchiveApril 2012

Debating Appending

There was a session at the recent Email Insiders Summit that discussed appending. I wasn’t there, but I’ve been hearing about the session, including one description that involved the term ‘fist fight.’ I have found a couple articles about the session. E-Append Comes Under Fire Email Insider Summit Email Append Panel — The Day’s Hottest Debate I encourage folks...

AOL delivery problems

There have been ongoing reports this week from ESPs and ISPs that AOL is having problems accepting email. People are reporting difficulties connecting to AOL MTAs and random dropping of connections. Other people are reporting random rejection messages that make no sense. A number of folks are seeing rejections claiming that the reason is a new IP when that IP has successfully sent mail from that...

Five-Ten blacklist retired

The Five-Ten website has a notice that they have retired the blacklist. Five-Ten wasn’t the greatest list for blocking mail, they aggressively listed senders and there were a number of false positives against a standard mail stream. But it was useful as a touchpoint. If I had a client that wasn’t listed on Five-Ten that told me something about their normal practices.

Everybody wins!

There was a recent question on a mailing list during a discussion of spam and delivery problems. A number of folks who work in delivery were discussing how a bad address got on a list. Someone who works on the spam blocking end of things asked why do you care how a bad address got onto a mailing list? For recipients, they usually don’t care. They just want the unsolicited mail to stop...

Hunting the Human Representative

Yesterday’s post was inspired by a number of questions I’ve fielded recently from people in the email industry. Some were clients, some were colleagues on mailing lists, but in most cases they’d found a delivery issue that they couldn’t solve and were looking for the elusive Human Representative of an ISP. There was a time when having a contact inside an ISP was almost...

First step in delivery

Ever trawl through your logs and notice that there is a delivery problem somewhere? I’m sure everyone sending email in any volume has. What’s the first thing you do when you discover a block? A: Decide that something broke on your end and set about trying to figure out what you did to trigger the block. B: Decide that something broke on the ISP end and set about trying to find a human...

OOPS!

Y’know those days when it seems everything goes wrong? And you just can’t get it right? A couple companies who send commercial mail have had a day like that. Yesterday I got an email at 6am from a vendor telling me there was a new, important update to download and install. I put it off because it’s software I don’t use very often and I’m waiting until we have a...

Forcing those opens

Most email marketers want to see their open rates go up. This particular marketer has come up with a new way to force recipients to load their mail. I’m not sure how successful this approach is going to be. I can see how this might increase open rate, as people who are interested in registering but may not load images by default actually load images. On the other hand, how common is it to...

Getting rid of the via at Gmail

There was a question submitted today about the verification process at Gmail. even though SPF authentication is passed, a via is added to mail sent from a webserver. The return-path is not the same as the visible from field, but there’s no way for me to change it. Does that mean I won’t be able to get rid of the via? This actually ties in to some research Steve and I did a few months ago about...

Inbox rates and conversion rates

Jeanne Jennings published an interesting bit of research on open rates and inbox rates at ClickZ recently. Essentially she looked at two different industry studies and compared their results. The first study was the Return Path Global Delivery Survey and the second was the Epsilon North American Trend Results. What Jeanne found is that while Return Path shows a decrease in inbox placement...

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