As Reddit recently learned it’s not a great idea to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host mailservers. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them related to the reputation of mail coming from EC2 servers. When you’re using machines in the cloud, changing IP addresses is as simple as initializing a new server. Spammers discovered this almost as soon as the EC2 cloud became public...
Ben over at Mailchimp writes about Reddit discovering a lot of their mail was being blocked because they were sending from the Amazon EC2 cloud.
It used to be that every potential client that called me up to ask me to help them with their delivery issues would tell me they weren’t a spammer. Over the last year or so that’s changed to telling me that they have a good reputation and don’t understand why they’re having delivery problems. This leads me to believe that there is some confusion about what reputation is...
Seven myths and two truths about email My favorite: [myth] Engagement is the new reputation. Actually, reputation metrics have always been about engagement, which is what complaint data and sender reputation reflect. Yes. This. Reputation, permission, all of those things are a way to quantify one simple fact: Do recipients want this mail from this sender? Send mail people want and generally it...
There are a number of things that make a responsible ESP, including setting and enforcing standards higher than those set by the ISPs. One of the responsible ESPs is Mailchimp. (Full disclaimer, I do consult for Mailchimp.) This ESP focuses on businesses with small to medium sized lists. They screen new customers for source of permission as well as mail content. As well as putting a human in the...
Yesterday I talked about how I’m hearing warnings of a coming paradigm shift in the email industry. While these changes will affect all sender, ESPs in particular are going to need to change how they interact with both ISPs and their customers. Currently, ESPs are able to act as “routine conveyers.” The traffic going across their network is generated by their customers and the ESP only handles...
This morning AOL announced some changes to their Enhanced White List. Given I’ve not talked very much about the AOL EWL in the past, this is as good a time as any to talk about it. The AOL Enhanced Whitelist is for those senders that have very good practices. Senders on the EWL not only get their mail delivered to the inbox, but also have links and images enabled by default. Placement on...
Number one of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly. I need at least one IP address per customer, to handle IP based reputation Why this is right While DKIM is gradually moving the main key for reputation tracking to a domain based token, right now the main key that is used to track reputation is the sending IP address. If...
One of the more challenging things I do is work with companies who have poor reputations that they’re trying to repair. These companies have been getting by with poor practices for a while, but finally the daily delivery falls below their pain threshold and they decide they need to fix things. That’s when they call me in, usually asking me if I can go to the ISPs and tell the ISPs...
Recently, one of my clients had a new employee make a mistake and ended up sending newsletters to people in their database that had not subscribed to those particular newsletters. This resulted in their recipients getting 3 extra emails from them. These things happen, people fat-finger database queries or aren’t as careful with segmentation as they should be. My clients were predictably...
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