SNDS News

A number of people have mentioned over the last week or so that they’re seeing a lot of outages, failures and general ickiness with SNDS. I contacted Microsoft and asked about it. SNDS has been undergoing some upgrades and improvements and the outages were not intended to be end user visible. They’re going to keep a closer eye on things, while they finish the upgrades.
The good news in all of this is that SNDS is being upgraded and maintained. SNDS is still a functioning part of the Microsoft infrastructure, and this is good news for anyone who uses it as a data source.

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Outlook.com

The big news in email today is Microsoft’s announcement of the next version of Hotmail: Outlook.com. This does appear to be an attempt to compete with a host of Google’s offerings. Not only does Outlook.com include Skype and access to social media accounts, but it also includes web app versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint with 7GB of storage space.
I’m not sure how actively people will be grabbing Outlook.com addresses, as you can use hotmail.com addresses with the Outlook.com interface. Only time will tell, though, how this affects email marketing and spam filtering.

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SNDS is back

For years now, Microsoft has maintained Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) for anyone sending mail to Hotmail/Outlook/Live.com. This is a great way for anyone responsible for an IP sending mail to hotmail to monitor what traffic Hotmail is seeing from that IP address.
This morning I got up to a number of people complaining that logins were failing on the website and the API was down. I contacted the person behind SNDS and they confirmed there was a problem and they were fixing it.
Sometime this afternoon it was possible to login to the SNDS interface again, so it looks like they did fix it.
A bit of a warning, though, don’t expect to see any of the data from the last few days. There seems to be something with SNDS that means that when the service is down data isn’t collected or available. In the past when there have been problems, older data was not populated when the service came back.

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Storms, outages and email

There’s been quite a bit of discussion about how Hurricane (Superstorm?) Sandy has affected email delivery over the last week. There are a couple things that may affect delivery at a number of domains.
Receiving mailservers hosted in facilities that lost power or connectivity for one reason or another. Most of these issues seem to be resolved now, although a number of places are still on generator power. There are also a number of facilities where employees and customers went above and beyond the call of duty to keep those facilities running. Peer1 got a lot of press for their bucket brigade, but they’re not the only company that kept running despite power outages, flooding and horrible conditions.
Routing hardware went down in a number of places. Again, mostly because of the power outages. Router failures can mean that some mail can’t get from A to B, even if both A and B are up and functioning. As with the servers, these problems seem mostly under control.
Recipients don’t have power or internet at home. In fact, I think this is one of the bigger marketing challenges. Recipients can’t get their mail because they don’t have power or internet. This is probably going to have a bit of a longer term affect on email. Even when folks get their email back, the latest sale email from their favorite vendor isn’t necessarily going to be what they are looking for in their inbox. Even if they are looking for that sale email, they’re going to have a mailbox with days worth of email to sort through.
None of this is a long term problem. It’s mostly temporary. But marketers can expect lower open and click rates during the storm cleanup and restoration phase.

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