Recent Posts

AOL changes bounce behaviour

A couple other bloggers have commented on the recent AOL blog post talking about changes to the MAILER-DAEMON string on bounce messages.

I’ve been thinking for a while that a delivery blog carnival might be an interesting thing. Al, Mickey and I were talking today about a comment on an article and we thought it might be interesting if we all blogged about it. Then I thought we could open it up to a wider audience.
The comment that prompted our conversation is:

Gmail unsubscribe option update

Brad Taylor has a post on the official Gmail blog talking about the new unsubscribe option. There are two points I didn’t cover here yesterday.

Gmail offering unsubscribe option

This morning Lifehacker reported that Gmail was offering an option to unsubscribe from some legitimate email lists.
Gmail’s help pages say:

Fixing high complaint rates and improving reputation

Why do recipients complain about my email?
This question is asked over and over again and there is no one answer. There are a number of reasons and all of them interact with one another.
What factors have recipients mentioned?

Another list purchase horror story

Last week Ken wrote about a marketer who is claiming he was ripped off by Target Point in a purchased list deal. To the purchaser’s credit he actually looked at the email addresses provided by Target Point, something many list purchasers don’t seem to do. This gave him some idea that the list was not opt-in.

Yahoo fixed XBL problem

Yahoo sent out an email yesterday evening to their postmaster mailing list saying they believe they have fixed the issue that I mentioned earlier this week. Some of the MXs were erroneously rejecting mail claiming that the sending IPs were on the XBL.

Blocked for phishing

A couple clients recently have had bounces from different places indicating that their mails were caught by the recipients’ anti-virus filter. These are some of my better clients sending out daily newsletters. They’ve been mailing for years and I know that they are not phishing. They asked me to investigate the bounce messages.
The information I had to work with was minimal. One bounce said:

12% of email recipients respond to spam

Twitter and some of the other delivery blogs are all abuzz today talking about the consumer survey released by MAAWG (pdf link, large file) looking at end user knowledge and awareness of email security practices.
The survey has a lot of good data and I strongly encourage people to look at the full report. There are a couple of results that are generating most of the buzz, including the fact that nearly half of the respondents have clicked on a link or replied to a spam email. Additionally, 17% of respondents said they made a mistake when they clicked on the link.
The magic statistic, though, is that 12% of the respondents said that they responded to spam because they were interested in the products or services offered in the spam. This, right there, is one of the major reasons why spam continues and is a growing problem. Out of 800 people surveyed, almost 100 of them were interested enough in the products sold by spam to respond positively. There are roughly 1.6 billion people on the Internet, which gives spammers a market of 200 million people for their spam.
Other studies have seen similar responses, that is consumers do respond to spam. Most surveys don’t define spam, however, and given a lot of consumers call “mail I don’t like” or “all commercial email” as spam it’s hard to know what the respondents are responding too. In some studies, some respondents even defined mail from companies that they had given their email address to, but had not explicitly asked for email from as spam. In this study MAAWG did request how the respondent defined spam. Of the respondents, 60% say spam is mail they did not solicit, and 41% say spam is mail that ends up in the spam folder. Given that 60% of respondents define spam as “unsolicited email” it is possible that some people are responding to mail they never requested.
Sad news for those of us who were hoping that lack of consumer response would make spamming unprofitable enough that spammers would stop.
The crosstab between “how do you define spam” and “how do you react to spam” may be an interesting data set to see.

Yahoo delivery problems

Al writes about a Yahoo delivery problem where they have identified a particular Yahoo MX that is falsely returning “mail blocked due to XBL.” The IPs in question are not on the XBL. Yahoo is aware of the issue and are working on a resolution. If you are seeing these bounces, Yahoo is aware of the issue. Exacttarget has worked around the issue by suspending deliveries to the affected MX.