Zombie email: Part 1

Zombie email addresses: those email addresses that never really die, eat your brains and destroy your email delivery. To understand zombie addresses and why they’re just now becoming a problem, we really need to understand some of the history of email addresses.
In the early days of the net, people got an email address usually associated directly with their access to the Internet. Many of them ended with .edu or .gov. I even had one that ended in .BITNET for a while. The first ISPs followed this convention. Users signed up for an account at a local dialup and were assigned an email address, and that was their email address. It wasn’t until the late 1990’s where there was widespread access to multiple email addresses.
What this means is that when people left a job, or canceled their Internet access their email address went away. Addresses that were abandoned would, after a short period of time, start bouncing back with user unknown, giving everyone the opportunity to stop mailing that account.
Even with the advent of multiple addresses for a single account and the easy availability of free addresses from places like Hotmail addresses that had been abandoned would still bounce off a list. Why? Because accounts had limited storage. My first dialup account had, I think, 10MB of space. It may have been as much as 20MB, but it wasn’t very much. Accounts receiving a lot of mail that weren’t checked frequently would fill up and start bouncing mail. Senders would be able to remove abandoned accounts because they were full.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about two things happened in the early 2000’s that changed email and led to the rise of zombie email.
Zombie Email: Part 2
Zombie Email: Part 3
Zombie Apocalypse

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Over the weekend, one of the major ISPs purged a lot of abandoned accounts from their system. This has resulted in a massive increase in 550 user unknown bounces at that ISP. This ISP is one of those that uses bounces to feed into their reputation system and the purge may cause otherwise good senders to be blocked temporarily.
Talking to clients and other industry folks, it looks like the addresses that have newly bounced off had zero activity for at least 6 months. Nothing. Nada. No clicks. No opens. No interaction.
This is why data hygiene is so critical. Just because the emails are being accepted at the ISP, and even showing inbox placement at the mailbox monitoring companies does not mean that there is actually someone reading your email. Failure to look at overall data means that when an ISP bulk deletes abandoned accounts then bounces will increase. While I don’t expect this to have any real, long term effect on sender reputation I do expect that some senders with a lot of cruft on their list will see some short term delivery problems.
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Ongoing data hygiene shows you what your list really is, not your list plus abandoned accounts. The addresses that the ISP purged? They were not valuable anyway. No one was reading that mail for at least 6 months.
If you did see a spike in bounces this weekend at a major ISP, you should really look at engagement. If some percentage of recipients at one ISP are actually non-existent, then it’s likely that about that same number are non-existent at other major ISPs as well. What are you going to do to identify and remove those dead addresses from your lists?

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I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
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Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
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