Recent Posts

Delivery delays due to congestion

Now that we’re deep in the middle of the Christmas shopping season, I’m seeing more and more complaints about delays at ISPs. Mickey talked about everything the ISPs have to consider when making hardware and buildout decisions in his post The hard truth about email on Spamtacular. When, like on cyber Monday, there’s a sharp increase in the volume of email, sometimes ISPs don’t have the capacity to accept all the email that is thrown at them.

A quick marketers guide to DKIM

J.D. Falk posted a brief but comprehensive guide to the different DKIM flags: what they mean and how they may affect delivery. (The original link seems to be dead so I reproduced the blog post for reference It’s just that good. A DKIM Primer Resurrected

Irrelevant emails drive unsubscribes

A new study published by the Chief Marketing Officer Council and and InfoPrint shows that nearly 50% of all unsubscribes were driven by a lack of relevancy.

Cyber Monday inundation

The cyber monday inundation of mail has hit my mailbox. There’s been a clear increase in marketing mail over the last week. Unfortunately for those marketers, it’s too much and I am just scanning subject lines and marking as read. I don’t have the time to read all this mail.

Legitimate email marketers need to take a stand

I was reading an article on Virus Rants and the opening paragraph really stood out.

AOL EWL: low complaints no longer enough

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 the EWL is done solely on the basis of mail performance and only the best senders get on the list.
The new announcement this morning says that AOL will take more into account than just complaints. Previously, senders with the lowest complaint rates qualified for the EWL. Now, senders must also have a good reputation in addition to the low complaint rates. Good reputation is a measure of user engagement with a particular sender.
This change only reinforces what I and many other delivery experts have been saying: The secret to good delivery is to send mail recipients want. ISPs are making delivery decisions based on those measurements. Send mail that recipients want, and there are few delivery problems.
For a long time good delivery was tied closely to complaint rates, so senders focused on complaints. Spammers focused on complaints too, thus managing to actually get some of their spam delivered. ISPs noticed and started looking at other ways to distinguish wanted mail from spam. One of the better ways to separate spam from wanted mail is to look at user engagement. And the ISPs are measuring engagement and using that measurement as part of their decision making process. Send so much mail users don’t read it, and your reputation goes down followed by your delivery rates.

Sending too much mail

Not having policies restricting the amount of mail any customer or recipient receives may lead to higher spam complaint rates and blocking warns the DMA Email Marketing Council.
HT: Box of Meat

New Blog Design

After a little more than two years and 500 posts we thought it was time for a redesign of the Word to the Wise blog.
While we were cleaning up the design we also fixed some functionality that was broken and added some new features:

The nightmare before Christmas

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.

Cox and the FCC wireless list

On Nov 20, Cox added a number of domains to the FCC Wireless domain list. One of the domains added was cox.net. This caused understandable consternation among a number of senders, as the opt-in requirements for wireless domains are much more stringent than for sending to non-wireless domains.
Earlier today, Tom Bartel, from Return Path tweeted: “We pinged them – likely error -they are on it – keep an eye on the FCC listing for an update.”
So it appears that the listing was most likely unintentional (and I’m hearing around the industry that someone from Cox have confirmed that it was a mistake) and they will be removing the domain from the list soon.