Delivery case study
Mailchimp published a case study looking at a customer moving from sending in house to using Mailchimp.
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Compliance vs. Deliverability
Most people I know handling delivery issues for senders have some version of delivery or deliverability in their job title. But as I talk to them about what they do on a daily basis, their role is as much policy enforcement and compliance as it is delivery. Sure, what they’re telling customers and clients is how to improve delivery, but that is often in the context of making customers comply with relevant terms and conditions.
Some delivery folks also work the abuse desk, handling complaints and FBLs and actually putting blocks on customer sends.
I think the compliance part of the delivery job description that is often overlooked and severely downplayed. No one likes to be the bad guy. None of us like handling the angry customer on the phone who has had their vital email marketing program shut down by their vendor. None of us like the internal political battles to convince management to adopt stricter customer policies. All of these things, however, are vital to delivery.
Despite the lack of emphasis on compliance and enforcement they are a vital and critical part of the deliverabilty equation.
E-Postage Just Won't Die
E-Postage is back! Wired covers a report from New Scientist. Here’s what they have to say: “Yahoo’s researchers want you to voluntarily slap a one-cent stamp on your outgoing e-mails, with proceeds going to charity, in a bid to cut down on spam. Can doing good really do away with spam, which consumes 33 terawatt hours of electricity every year, not to mention way too much of our time?”
Alex Rubin at Return Path says hold up, wait a minute. He writes: “Our contacts at Yahoo! tell us this idea is purely in the research realm, and is not scheduled for development in Yahoo! Mail. In other words: it isn’t even vaporware and isn’t likely to be a part of the Yahoo! mail system anytime soon.” He goes on to say (I’m paraphrasing) that oops, Yahoo didn’t really intend for this research to become public.
So, apparently, there are no plans for Yahoo to roll out E-Postage today, tomorrow or next week. Nothing to see here, beyond a simple web site and some thoughts from a Yahoo researcher. Some individual’s hopeful vision for the future, not a corporate announcement of an upcoming product.
E-Postage has always been a neat idea, I’ve thought. A neat idea beset by insurmountable problems. First, end users don’t want to pay for the email messages they send, they want all you can eat. With years of webmail providers offering free email access, you’ll have a heck of a time convincing somebody’s grandmother that they have to pony up a nickel to be able to email the grandkids.
Then, answer me this: Who’s going to handle the economics on the back-end? And any time you have a computer storing a resource (like, say, account information for that tiny little bit of money you’ll need to be able to send me an email), that information can be hacked, exploited, stolen. You think spammers are actually going to pony up? Why would they? They’ll just hack into millions of exploitable computers, stealing five cents from everyone along the way, and gleefully shoveling millions of spams into millions of inboxes.
This concept of E-Postage, either paying money to send email, or spending “computational power” to send email, has been kicking around for years. Periodically, some researcher comes up with the idea anew, and suggests that we all immediately adopt their sure fire plan to solve the world’s spam problem, immediately, pennies at a time. These ideas never seem to go anywhere. And that will never change until somebody can actually convince most of the world to adopt their proposed scheme. Will it ever happen? Never say never, but I have no plans to rush out and buy e-Stamps any time soon.
— Al Iverson
The good, the typical and the ugly
In the theme of the ongoing discussions about ESPs and their role in the email ecosystem, I thought I’d present some examples of how different ESPs work.
The good ESPs are those that set and enforce higher standards than the ISPs. They invest money and time in both proactive and reactive policy enforcement. On Monday I’ll talk about these standards, and the benefits of implementing these policies.
The typical ESPs are those that have standards equivalent to those of the ISPs. They suspend or disconnect customers when the customers generate problems at the ISPs. They have some proactive policy enforcement, but most of their enforcement is reactive. On Tuesday I’ll talk about these standards and how they’re perceived by the ISPs and spam filtering companies.
The ugly ESPs are those that have low standards and few enforcement policies. They let customers send mail without permission. Some of the ugly ESPs even abuse other ESPs to send some of their mail, thus sharing their bad reputations across the industry. On Wednesday I’ll look at some of their practices and discuss how they affect other players in the industry.