This morning I was reading a blog post about the failure of the congressional super committee. The author commented parties can’t reach an agreement if they’re not even having the same conversation. I realized this is just as true in email as it is in politics. All too often we’re not having the same conversation. Look at the comments thread on my spamtraps post. Steve Henderson and I...
One thing I repeat over and over again is to not send mail that looks like spam. Over at the Mailchimp Blog they report some hard data on what looks like spam. The design is simple, they took examples of mail sent by their customers and forwarded them over to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project to be reviewed by humans. In a number of cases they discovered that certain kinds of templates kept...
I’m hearing from multiple sources that they’ve been having problems getting mail delivered to optonline.net, optonline.com and optimum.net all day. This appears to be affecting senders across the board, from ISPs to ESPs. It looks like something is not working right over there, and hammering retries doesn’t seem to be helping. The best recommendation is for senders to back off...
Recently, an abuse desk rep asked what to do when customers were complaining about being assigned an IP address located on a blocklist. Because not every blocklist actually affects mail delivery it’s helpful to identify if the listing is causing a problem before diving in and trying to resolve the issue. Find out whether mail is actually being blocked, or whether the customer just went to...
Someone asked yesterday What business advantage is there to an ISP in offering a feedback loop? I’ve never really seen one. It’s a good question. There’s a fair bit of work involved in offering, maintaining and supporting a feedback loop. What makes it worth it? At a consumer ISP there’s some email sent to customers that’s easy for spam filters to recognize and...
I’m working on a few projects designed to help provide mentoring for other delivery people and to bridge the communication gap between the various groups active in email. One of those projects is collecting, linking to, and publishing more delivery resources. Some will be linked to directly from the blog, others will be linked to from the wiki. While I’m reasonably familiar with...
Over the last few weeks I’ve had a series of posts on the blog from various authors who are active in the email space. I posted A very young industry commenting on the lack of experience among email marketers. I think that some of the conflict between ISPs and ESPs and receivers and marketers can be traced back to this lack of longevity and experience. Often there is only a single delivery...
Guest post by Phil Schott I often have the pleasure of putting my four year-old son to bed at night and I’m usually exhausted afterward. It’s a never-ending string of questions and admonishments that goes something like this, “Daddy, is it a stay-at-home day tomorrow? “No, Joe, tomorrow is a go-to-school day, it’s Tuesday. Joe, stop talking and go to sleep and please...
Guest Post by JD Falk There was certainly some surprise in the room when I pointed out (yep, it was me) that Laura has been around since before there were ESPs. Part of it, I’m sure, was because Laura’s not particularly ancient — and part was because it’s a shock to realize that people sent and received email and everything was just fine long before the segment of the...
Last week I saw a tweet that quoted Joel Book, Director of eMarketing Education at Exacttarget as saying less than 20% of ppl in #emailmarketing have more than 2 yrs experience I have this feeling that some of the industry wide issues with conflicts between “frat boys” and “utilitarians” is partly due to the lack of experience on the email marketing side. Contrast that...
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