Mistakes happen

As happens every Tuesday, the Magill Report was blasted into mailboxes all over the Internet. This Tuesday was extra special for some recipients, though. These recipients received a dozen or more copies of the newsletter.
Ken knows best practices and implements them rigidly in regards to his sending. He’s one of the very few standalone publishers that uses confirmed opt-in, for instance. But even with the best practices in place, sometimes bad stuff happens. From what little I’ve seen, this looks like some bit of software fell over somewhere.
In this case, there isn’t a lot to do. Sure, people are talking about it, but I don’t think anyone is treating this as anything other than an aberration or a software glitch. Ken doesn’t need to send out an apology and I suspect that he’s not lost a single subscriber due to this. People are willing to cut a sender a break when they have a long history of sending. I do expect we’ll see something about this in next week’s newsletter, possibly concluding with him looking for a new ESP.
Sending failures happen all too frequently. Some are embarrassing, some cause significant business problems. The biggest issues are when a send goes to addresses that shouldn’t be mailed, either unsubscribes, or bounces or inactives. These kinds of mistakes can drive blocks at ISPs and get the sender noticed by some blocklists.
The good news is that if it’s truly a one-off, then delivery may not be affected at all. And in cases where delivery is affected, problems tend to disappear quickly. Filters adjust and don’t take too much notice of a very short term aberration when there is a long term history of wanted email.