Evaluating usability at an ESP

Clients and random people often ask me to recommend an ESP based on “the best delivery.” I usually point out that most of the reputable ESPs are similar in terms of their delivery. There aren’t many widely used reputation services that block based on ESPs unless there is long term and ongoing problem from the ESP.
This is even more true when the ESP uses dedicated IPs for customers. ESPs that use shared IPs can have poor delivery if they don’t effectively police customers and lower the reputation of all their IP addresses.
My normal comment about ESPs is to find a price point and feature set that meets the client’s needs. Clickmail has a good post about how to evaluate an ESP for usability.

Related Posts

Just go read here…

I wrote earlier this week about bad ways to evaluate and choose an ESP. It was all going to end today in an insightful and profound post telling all of you exactly how to find the best ESP.
Then Smartinsights published an insightful and useful article on choosing an ESP yesterday.
So, yeah, just go read what Jordie has to say. I have a couple other things to add, but I’ll drop those in another post.

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ESPs, complaints and spam

Steve wrote a while back about how Mailchimp handled his complaint.
Sadly, I have a counter example from recently.

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Spear phishing

It’s been about a year since people started publicly talking about spear phishing attacks against ESPs and major emailers. There was a lot of energy put into talking about how to protect against future attacks. I have to wonder, though, how much of that talk translated into action?
What processes do you have in place to protect your company against attacks?
If you’re at an ESP, do you have the ability to scan your outgoing stream for keywords or domains?
If you’re a brand, have you implemented restrictions on which employees have access to your databases?
What have you done since the last set of attacks? Are you vulnerable if new attacks start?
More information on ESP attacks:
Be on the lookout
Time for a real security response
Email attacks

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