Sending mail only Monday through Friday can cause reputation and delivery problems at some ISPs, even when senders are doing everything right. This “weekend effect” is a consequence of how ISPs measure reputation over time. Most ISPs calculating complaint rate use a simple calculation. They measure how many “this is spam” clicks a source IP generates in a 24 hour period...
AllSpammedUp has a post describing the primary techniques anti-spam filters use to identify mail as spam or not spam. While is this not sender or delivery focused knowledge, it is important for people sending mail to have a basic understanding of filtering mechanisms. Without that base knowledge, it’s difficult to troubleshoot problems and resolve issues. Any anti-spam system that is worth...
I spent the morning in multiple venues correcting mis-understandings of confirmed opt-in. The misunderstandings weren’t so much that people didn’t understand how COI works, but more they didn’t understand all the implications. In one venue, the conversation centered around how small a portion of deliverability the initial subscription process affects. Sure, sending unwanted...
Part 3 in an ongoing series on campaign stats and measurements. In this installment, I will look a little closer at what other people are measuring about your email and how that affects your reputation at the ISPs. Part 1: Campaign Stats and Measurements Part 2: Measuring Open Rate Reputation at the ISPs is an overall measure of how responsive recipients are to your email. ISPs also look at how...
Another installment in my ongoing series: That’s What Spammers Do. In today’s installment we take a look at a company deceiving recipients and hiding their real identity. One of my disposable addresses has been getting heavily spammed from mylife.com. The subject lines are not just deceptive, they are provably lies. The mail is coming from random domains like urlprotect.com or...
Stephanie Miller from RP blogs at EEC about a UK consumer survey with the take home message: “consumers notice what email marketers do. When we send something interesting and relevant at a good pace, they are happy to stay active with our programs. When we don’t… well, then we’ve lost them, perhaps for good.”
In this part of my series on Campaign Stats and Measurements I will be examining open rates, how they are used, where they fail and how the can be effectively used. There has been an lot written about open rates recently, but there are two posts that stand out to me. One was the EEC’s post on renaming open rate to render rate and Mark Brownlow’s excellent post on what open rate does...
Do you know what your campaign stats mean? Do you know what it is that you’re measuring? I think there are a lot of emailers out there who have no idea what they are measuring and what those measurements mean. The most common measurement used is “open rate.” There’s been quite a bit of discussion recently about open rates, how they’re calculated, and is there a...
Deliverability is a term so many people use every day, but what do we really mean when we use it? Is there an accepted definition of deliverability? Is the concept different than delivery? At a recent conference I was running a session talking about email delivery, senders and the roles senders play in the email industry and at that particular organization. The discussion went on for a while, and...
We all know that receiving ISPs rate limit incoming email. With the volumes of mail that they’re currently dealing with they must do that in order to keep their servers from falling over. A client was dealing with rate limits recently. These were not typical rate limits, in that the recipient ISP was 4xxing mail. Instead, the recipient ISP was not accepting any incoming connections. The...
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