This is pretty clear evidence that AOL accounts are being transferred to the Oath / Verizon Media / Yahoo backend. AOL has been slowly disabling their postmaster pages and I don’t trust them to provide accurate info any longer. I am also way of using the contact forms at AOL these days. It’s possible that no one is monitoring them. Looks like the last of the AOL mail infrastructure is...
When asking a for assistance with email delivery, there are some pieces of information that are required before anyone can help. Be prepared with the information so you can get timely assistance. This advice is true whether you’re looking for help from peers or working with paid deliverability consultants. What is the problem? Be very specific about the problem you see. The fix for mail...
The question came up on slack this morning about bounce rate benchmarks. What are the normal / average bounces that different ESPs see? Does region matter? What’s acceptable for bounce rates? Bounce rate is an overall measure of address quality Here’s your the chance for ESPs share the data from your customers. We’re interested in anything you care to share. But more detail is...
When I checked in on Facebook this morning there was a discussion from a couple people frustrated by cousin domains. I share their frustration. Kitten running through field with text “every time a marketing department registers a cousin domain, god kills a kitten” Cousin domains are a major problem for ISPs trying to protect their users from phishing and other fraud. Because so many companies use...
When it comes to SPF records there seems to be a lot of confusion. I mean, a decade after I posted it Authenticating SPF is still the most frequently visited post on the site. And, of course, there are hundreds of other pages out there that discuss SPF and what to publish. Still, there are common questions. Most recently I’ve been addressing questions about what SPF records need to be...
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post focusing on one small part of bounce handling. Today I want to talk about delivery failures that aren’t bounces. This is really the biggest issue for companies who have written their own bulk sending servers. Modern bulk MTA appliances and ESPs correctly handle these types of bounces. However, when you’re troubleshooting it’s important to know...
One of the side effects of using tagged addresses to sign up for things is seeing exactly what companies do with your data once they get it. For instance, 3 years ago I downloaded a white paper or something from an ESP. That white paper was apparently co-branded and the other company got my email address from the ESP. They’re now sending mail to that address. I unsubscribed from the ESP...
I really dislike whomever it was that coined the term pristine spamtraps. I get what they were trying to do, explain the different kinds of spamtraps and how different traps get on your list in different ways. Except… any type of trap can end up on your list in any way. For instance, not every recycled trap shows up on a list because bounce handling is bad. Sometimes, people input their old...
Spamtraps strike fear into the heart of senders. They’ve turned into this monster metric that can make or break a marketing program. They’ve become a measure and a goal and I think some senders put way too much emphasis on spamtraps instead of worrying about their overall data accuracy. Recently I got a question from a client about the chances that any address they were currently...
One of the toughest deliverability problems to deal with is when mail is blocked or going to spam because the filters are working as intended. Often the underlying issue is a lack of permission. In the consumer space there are some thing the sender can do to change their metrics and get to the inbox. The reality is that a lot of companies who send to consumers can get good delivery even when they...
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