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.
May 11, 2010
Reddit and email
11May
May 10, 2010
Reputation
10May
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...
February 18, 2010
Truths and myths about email
18February
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...
December 21, 2009
What makes a good ESP?
21December
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...
December 9, 2009
The coming changes
09December
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...
November 25, 2009
AOL EWL: low complaints no longer enough
25November
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...
November 2, 2009
I need IP addresses for reputation
02November
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...
October 8, 2009
Rescuing reputation
08October
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...
September 24, 2009
How reputation and content interact
24September
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...
September 22, 2009
Technology does not trump policy when it comes to delivery
22September
Recently Ken Magill wrote an article looking at how an ESP was attempting to sell him services based on the ESPs ‘high deliverability rates.’ I commented that Ken was right, and I still think he is. Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article...
RSS - Posts