Seth Godin has a post up today talking about how friction, that is the cost of sending marketing, is good for marketing. With more friction, marketers make choices about sending instead of sending to everyone. The post touches on a point I’ve certainly tried to explain to clients and senders in general. Email, of course, is free. Except it’s not. The friction that slows down sending...
Yahoo and Verizon
Mickey at Spamtacular has information about Verizon’s email system that will have relevance for anyone working in delivery. Verizon has partnered with several megaportal sites depending on which Verizon service a subscriber is using. FiOS customers can pick between AOL and Yahoo while DSL customers get AOL, Yahoo, MSN Premium, or Windows Live to select among. The portal site that you select...
Failed delivery of permission based email
A few weeks ago, ReturnPath published a study showing that 20% of permission based email was blocked. I previously discussed the definition of permission based email and that not all the mail described as permission based is actually sent with the permission of the recipient. However, I only consider this a small fraction of the mail RP is measuring, somewhere in the 3 – 5% range. What...
New Delivery tools
A couple nifty new delivery tools were published over the weekend. Mickey published Bounce P.I. where senders can paste in an error message or bounce and it will tell you what filter generated it. If the rejection is unrecognized, it will flag the message internally and it will be researched to see if the filter can be identified. Steve has a new tool at the DKIMCore site. The key generating tool...
Permission Based Emails? Are you sure?
Yesterday I wrote about the ReturnPath study showing 21% of permission based email does not make it to the inbox. There are a number of reasons I can think of for this result, but I think one of the major ones is that not all the mail they are monitoring is permission based. I have no doubt that all of the RP customers say that the mail they’re sending is permission based, I also have no...
Delivery Metrics
Last week ReturnPath published a study that shows 20% of permission based email fails to be delivered to the inbox. For this study, ReturnPath looked at the mail sent by their mailbox monitor customers and counted the number of deliveries to the inbox, the number of deliveries to the bulk folder and the number of emails that were not delivered. At US ISPs 21% of the permission based emails sent...
AOL changes bounce behaviour
A couple other bloggers have commented on the recent AOL blog post talking about changes to the MAILER-DAEMON string on bounce messages. With the changes for inbound mail, ALL bounce messages (mostly due to user-defined spam settings) will have the sender name of MAILER-DAEMON@recipient –domain. For example, a member of yahoo sending to an AIM account with a user-defined block, would receive a...
Fixing high complaint rates and improving reputation
Why do recipients complain about my email? This question is asked over and over again and there is no one answer. There are a number of reasons and all of them interact with one another. What factors have recipients mentioned? High frequency – mail that is too frequent can annoy recipients and they’ll hit this is spam Low frequency – mail that is too infrequent may be unfamiliar...
Best time to send email: analysis and discussion
Mark Brownlow (who I don’t think is here in Ams, much to my disappointment) wrote a long assessment of how to determine what is the best time to send email. He walks through the questions and the data that a sender should evaluate when making the decision when to best send email. I have previously posted about my views on the best time to send email. There is no one best time to send email...
Delivery advice from Politico
Politico published an article Sunday looking at the best e-mail lists in politics. Their criteria for choosing the winner focused on list size and recipient engagement, measured by amount of money raised and recipient response to issues. Despite not being a delivery focused article or even mentioning delivery at all, this article is all about delivery. How can an article be about delivery without...