I’ve heard a lot of marketers complaining about people like me who advocate actually purging addresses from marketing lists if those addresses are non-responsive over a long period of time. They have any number of reasons this advice is poor. Some of them can even demonstrate that they get significant revenue from mailing folks who haven’t opened an email in years. They also point out...
Changes at Hotmail
Microsoft announced a number of changes to the Hotmail interface today. It doesn’t look like this will affect how mail is received, but will affect how users can interact with it.
As always, the best advice I can give you is send mail people want and like.
Holomaxx v. Yahoo and MS: The hearing
I visited Judge Fogel’s courtroom this morning to listen to the oral motions in the Holomaxx cases. This is a general impression, based on my notes. Nothing here is to be taken as direct quotes from any participant. Any errors are solely my own. With that disclaimer in mind, let’s go. The judge is treating these two cases as basically a single case. When it came time for arguments...
Holomaxx doubles down
Holomaxx has, as expected, filed a motion in opposition to the motion to dismiss filed by both Yahoo (opposition to Yahoo motion and Hotmail (opposition to Microsoft motion). To my mind they still don’t have much of an argument, but seem to believe that they can continue with this. They are continuing to claim that Microsoft is scanning email before the email gets to Microsoft (or Yahoo)...
Holomaxx status
Just for completeness sake, Holomaxx did also file an amended complaint against Microsoft. Same sloppy legal work, they left in all the stuff about Return Path even though Return Path has been dropped from the suit. They point to a MAAWG document as a objective industry standard when the MAAWG document was merely a record of a round table discussion, not actually a standards document. I...
Filtering adjustments at Hotmail
I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on various fora recently about increased delivery issues at Hotmail. Some senders are seeing more deferrals, some senders are seeing more mail in the bulk folder. Some senders aren’t seeing any changes. This leads me to believe that Hotmail made some adjustments to their filtering recently. Given some senders are unaffected, this appears to be a...
Reputation monitoring sites
There are a number of sites online that provide public information about reputation of an IP address or domain name. Sender Score – . Provided by Return Path. They collect data from some ISPs and blocklists. Using a proprietary formula, they calculate a sender score running from 1 – 100 for each IP address sending mail to their network. Higher scores means a better reputation. Can be...
SPF records: not really all that important
I’ve been working through some Hotmail issues with a client over the last few months. One of the things that has become clear to me is how little Hotmail actually does with SPF records. In fact, Hotmail completely ignored my client’s SPF record and continued to deliver email into the inbox. This isn’t just a sender that had a “well, we think most of our email will come...
Link roundup June 18, 2010
Hotmail has released a new version of their software with some changes. Return Path discusses the changes in depth, but there are a couple that senders may find helpful. If a user deletes a mail without reading it multiple times, Hotmail asks the user if they want to unsubscribe from the mail. Users can use a the new “sweep” feature to delete or file multiple emails easily Finally...
Microsoft delivery partnerships
Last week John Scarrow from Microsoft made a public statement on Deliverability.com about Microsoft’s approach to using available products in the email industry. […] before committing to a certain technology or provider we conduct rigorous testing and pilot programs to ensure that our internal standards are met. Until that bar is met, we have no partnership announcements to make...