Over at the Exacttarget blog, there is a guest post up from Annalivia who handles much of the sender support (and about 15 million other things) at AOL.
On the nights before Christmas…
when the relays are groaning under the loads
and ISP admins start to turn into toads
they tear out their hair and cry in despair
“why’s all this mail coming out of thin air?”
Head over to read the whole thing.
RoadRunner announced changes to their FBL this morning. Everyone who is currently getting a FBL should have received an email. Important dates to remember include the following.
August 28: Existing RR FBL will be frozen. No changes to existing loops will be accepted and no new FBL applications will be processed. All current FBLs will continue to work.
November 17 (tentative): The new FBL will go live. Existing FBLs will not be converted from the old FBL to the new one. Everyone wishing to be a part of the new FBL will be required to re-enroll in the program beginning on this date.
December 31 (tentative): The old FBL ceases to exist.
More information about the migration is available at http://postmaster.rr.com/FBL.html
Al has a guest post up from an ISP rep (now universally referred to as Barry) about senders contacting ISPs. It lists things senders do that Barry Don’t Like.
Listen to Barry.
There are also comments from various other Barrys in the comments. Those are worth reading, too.
There is no such thing as a delivery emergency. They just do not happen.
Delivery is fluid, delivery is changing, delivery is complex.
But when delivery goes bad it is not an emergency. There is no need to call up an ISP person at home on a Saturday afternoon and ask them to remove the filters. (And, BTW, experience indicates if you do this that you may have future delivery issues at that ISP.)
I’m sure that people will provide me with examples of delivery emergencies. And, in some cases I might even concede that the receivers will be happy to receive email immediately when it was sent. However, email as a protocol was designed for store and forward. It was not designed to transmit messages instantaneously from sender to receiver. Sure, it works that way much of the time these days. On the whole the Internet is fairly reliable and major servers are connected 24/7 (which wasn’t always the case).
Among many people, particularly recipients and ISP employees, there isn’t the expectation that bulk email is instantaneous. This leads to the belief that delivery problems are not an emergency. Everyone faces them, they get dealt with, life goes on. Demanding an escalation to deal with a “delivery emergency” may backfire and slow down how long it takes to get a response from an ISP.