Most people I know handling delivery issues for senders have some version of delivery or deliverability in their job title. But as I talk to them about what they do on a daily basis, their role is as much policy enforcement and compliance as it is delivery. Sure, what they’re telling customers and clients is how to improve delivery, but that is often in the context of making customers...
Some marketers, even large marketing companies, send mail from email addresses that are unread. Justin Premick posted a list of reasons this is a very, very bad idea. Be sure to read the comments, too.
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...
There are days I think we have trained people too well to believe every delivery problem is a misplaced spam block. We also have people trained to expect near 100% immediate delivery from send to inbox. The problem is, email isn’t 100% reliable. It’s close. Very close. But sometimes mail just fails. It’s not because the ISPs hate you. It’s sometimes not even because the...
Mark Brownlow skewers the arguments from opt-out proponents. A definite must read.
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...
Many of us are so used to email appearing instantaneous, we forget that the underlying protocol was never designed for instant messaging. When the SMTP protocol was originally proposed it was designed to support servers that may have had intermittent connectivity. The protocol allowed for email to be spooled to disk and then sent when resources were available. In fact, almost everyone who was...
Over at the AOL postmaster blog, Christine posts about reputation and AOL.
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