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.
 

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Turn it all the way up to 11

I made that joke the other night and most of the folks who heard it didn’t get the reference. It made me feel just a little bit old.
Anyhow, Mickey beat me to it and posted much of what I was going to say about Ken Magill’s response to a very small quote from Neil’s guest post on expiring email headers last week.
I, too, was at that meeting, and at many other meetings where marketers and the folks that run the ISP spam filters end up in the same room. I don’t think the marketers always understand what is happening inside the postmaster and filtering desks on a day to day basis at the ISPs. Legitimate marketing? It’s a small fraction of the mail they deal with. Ken claims that marketing pays the salaries of these employees and they’d be out of a job if marketing didn’t exist. Possibly, but only in the context that they are paid to keep their employers servers up and running so that the giant promises made by the marketing team of faster downloads and better online experiences actually happen.
If there wasn’t an internet and there weren’t servers to maintain, they’d have good jobs elsewhere. They’d be building trains or designing buildings or any of the thousands of other jobs that require smart technical people.
Ken has no idea what these folks running the filters and keeping your email alive deal with on a regular basis. They deal with the utter dregs and horrors of society. They are the people dealing with unrelenting spam and virus and phishing attacks bad enough to threaten to take down their networks and the networks of everyone else. They also end up dealing with law enforcement to deal with criminals. Some of what they do is deal with is unspeakable, abuse and mistreatment of children and animals. These are the folks who stand in front of the rest of us, and make the world better for all of us.
They should be thanked for doing their job, not chastised because they’re doing what the people who pay them expect them to be doing.
Yes, recipients want the mail they want. But, y’know, I bet they really don’t want all the bad stuff that the ISPs protect against. Ken took offense at a statement that he really shouldn’t have. ISPs do check their false positive rates on filtering, and those rates are generally less than 1% of all the email that they filter. Marketers should be glad they’re such a small part of the problem. They really don’t want to be a bigger part.

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Delivery reflects recipient desires

Ken has an article today about how Pro Flowers managed to get their mail out of the bulk folder at Gmail by asking their recipients for help.

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Goodmail for sale?

The first edition of the Magill Report dropped in my mailbox (and the mailboxes of lots of other people judged by my twitter feed) this afternoon. In his newsletter, tucked between an announcement of a new DMA CEO and rather depressing news about how long it’s taking to find jobs, he announced that Goodmail is being offered for sale. It seems that an investment banking firm is offering a company it calls “Project Conduit.”

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