We gave you a chance…

Our formerly feral cat was diagnosed with hyperthyroid disease earlier this year. This week she went in for treatment with radioactive iodine. Now that she’s home, we have some minor safety precautions (mostly around keeping radiation out of landfills and minimizing our exposure) for the next 2 weeks.
MC_forBlog
In previous careers, both Steve and I have been licensed to work with radioactivity so we’ve been swapping stories. Today I remembered an incident recounted during training. One lab had ordered some radioisotope and then mistakenly thrown out the isotope with the packaging material. An honest, but very expensive, mistake. Part of the fix was to have all radiation orders go through a central office on campus. This office would handle the opening and recording of the material and then distributing it to the appropriate research lab. As Steve put it, “We trusted you but you messed up, so now we have to institute some controls.”
This actually is how a lot of email compliance is done, too. Companies are allowed to do what they’re going to do. If they do something bad, even by mistake, there is often a lot of expensive cleanup. After the cleanup, the network (either the ESP or ISP) puts in place processes to limit the chance of this kind of mistake in the future.
In the email space the processes usually involves a couple things. First, the sender needs to change their acquisition process. This change limits the bad addresses getting onto a list in the future. Second, the sender needs to address the bad part of their current list. This often involves purging and/or re-engaging non-responsive addresses.
The fixes are painful for everyone involved. But when cleanup is expensive, prevention is important.

Deliverability and IP addresses
PTR Records

Related Posts

Do you have an abuse@ address?

I’ve mentioned multiple times before that I really don’t like using personal contacts until and unless the published or official channels fail. I don’t hold this opinion just about resolving delivery issues, but also use official channels when reporting spam to one of my addresses or spam traps.
My usual complaints contain a plain text copy of the mail, including full headers and a short summary of the email address it was sent to. “This is an address that was part of a leak from…” or “This is an address scraped off my website. It’s been removed from the website since 2004” or “This address isn’t used to sign up for any mail.”
Sadly, there are a number of “legitimate” ESPs that don’t have or don’t monitor their abuse address. In some cases it’s an oversight or a break down of internal mail handling. But in most cases, it’s a sign that the ESP doesn’t actually handle abuse.
It’s frustrating to watch an ESP post long blog posts about “best practices” and “effective delivery” and “not spamming” and yet not be able to actually stop their own customers from spamming. It’s not even that I necessarily want them to disconnect their spamming customers (although that would be nice) but suppressing the address that I’ve told them was a spamtrap seems trivial. And yet, a month after my first complaint and weeks after escalating to a personal contact, I’m still getting spam.
The 5 things every ESP should do to handle spam complaints.

Read More

Letters to the abuse desk

Ben over at Mailchimp has shared some of the mail that comes into the mailchimp abuse desk. It’s a post well worth a read.
One of the things that leaped out at me during that post is that the positive emails highlight how much the Mailchimp delivery and compliance people help their users get good delivery. They’re not just saying “you can’t do that” because they’re mean or they want to make life more difficult for their users. They are saying no because what the user wants to do is a bad idea.
I also appreciated the letter from the customer who had to tell Mailchimp that management had decided to not take Mailchimp’s advice. This is something that happens to me sometimes. Clients agree with my recommendations but management decides that they’re not going to implement them. It can be difficult to watch, particularly when I then see how much that company is struggling with blocks or see them show up on some of the big spam lists. But, it’s also part and parcel of the job. Not everyone, no matter how effectively I make my cases, will take my advice.
 
 

Read More

Technology does not trump policy when it comes to delivery

Recently Ken Magill wrote an article looking at how an ESP was attempting to sell him services based on the ESPs ‘high deliverability rates.’ I commented that Ken was right, and I still think he is.
Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article, pointing out that the vast majority of things affecting delivery are under the control of the list owner, not under the control of the ESP. As they are both right, I clearly agree with them. I’ve also posted about reputation and delivery regularly.

Read More