Salesforce buying Exacttarget

Reports today say that Salesforce is buying Exacttarget for around 2.5 billion dollars.

The offer for $33.75 per share in cash is 53 percent more that ExactTarget’s closing price yesterday. The transaction has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, according to a statement today.

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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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How difficult is it to get on whitelists?

Today’s question comes from Leslie J.

Just how difficult is it for a small business that runs a highly compliant mailing system to find
their way onto whitelists at the big freemail/spam filter providers?
It seems utterly impossible meaning man hours are completely wasted messing around with subjects and content when if the same business sends the very same message through any number of well know ESPs, the message will hit the inbox like the Mafia are in charge of the shooting match.

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Spamming ESPs: the followup

Campaign Monitor contacted me about yesterday’s post. The phrasing I picked out of the spammers AUP matched their AUP quite closely. In fact, if you plug the AUP into Google, Campaign Monitor comes up as one of the first hits.
It was not Campaign Monitor I was talking about. In fact, the ESP I received the mail from is not on the first 8 pages of Google hits for the phrases I posted.
A similar thing happened when I posted about Dell spamming me. Dell has multiple ESPs, and one of their ESPs contacted me directly in case they were the ones Dell was spamming through. It was no surprise to me that they weren’t the ESP involved.
This is what good ESPs do. Good ESPs monitor their reputation and monitor what people are saying about them. Good ESPs notice when people claim they’re being spammed and effectively reach out to the complainers so they can investigate the claim.
Good ESPs don’t just rely on the complaint numbers to take action. They keep an eye out on social networks to see who might be receiving mail they never asked for.

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