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Yahoo delivery problems

Over the last week or so a number of people have mentioned problems with delivery to Yahoo. It seems that some emails are being erroneously rejected. Earlier this week, Yahoo posted a message to the Yahoo Postmaster announcement list saying they were aware of the problem and were working on fixing it.

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Another perspective on the Politico article

Yesterday, I talked about the delivery advice that could be gleaned from the Politico article The best e-mail lists in politics. While there are some good practices and attitudes expressed in the article, there are problems with how some of the political lists are being handled.
For instance, Ken Magill signed up for any number of political lists during the last election cycle and has been chronicling the email he has received from the various campaigns. Yesterday he posted about the mail he has received at the address he gave Secretary Clinton’s campaign and how far and wide the list is being shared. He points out a couple truths missed by the Politico article.

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Delivery advice from Politico

Politico published an article Sunday looking at the best e-mail lists in politics. Their criteria for choosing the winner focused on list size and recipient engagement, measured by amount of money raised and recipient response to issues. Despite not being a delivery focused article or even mentioning delivery at all, this article is all about delivery.
How can an article be about delivery without ever mentioning the word? By actually looking at the effectiveness of the overall campaign and measuring how the lists actually perform. In the article, Politico used a number of criteria to evaluate different email lists and programs.

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ReturnPath customers?

Someone posted the following question about ReturnPath in the comments:

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Useful links: May 21

Dave Romerstein over at Cloudmark continues his series on blocked email. While he’s not saying anything different than many of us have already said, his perspective is well worth a read.

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CAN SPAM pre-emption in the courts

Ethan Ackerman has a summary of recent cases where judges are splitting over rulings on CAN SPAM pre-emption.

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TWSD: Dumb and dumber

I recently received a spam offering to get one of my personal websites listed in foreign search engines.  Harvesting addresses off websites is dumb. Even dumber is sending a followup a week later with a notice at the top.

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Best time to send email: redux

Last week I wrote about a study classifying different types of email users. My point is that senders should be very aware of how their users interact with email, in order to provide the best user experience and the most revenue for the sender. If, for instance, the bulk of recipients are daytime (9 – 5 M-F) users, then the best time to email is different than if the bulk of recipients are all the time users of email.
At least 2 different people commented on when the “best” time to send email was, completely missing the entire point of my post. When you send email should be related to when your users are active in their email client. Senders know this, because they can track times when people open and click on links in the email. The data is all there, it just needs to be mined.
Plus, if every sender sent mail at the exact same time, that being the best time to send mail, then it will immediately become the absolute worst time to send email.
Pay attention to your recipients, and not to the internet experts. Listen to what your customers and recipients are telling you. Do what’s best for them, not what’s best for Joe’s Bait and Tackle Shop.

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Odd Yahoo Bounces

A number of people are reporting seeing a new bounce from Yahoo. “smtp;553 Mail from x.x.x.x not allowed – [10]”. My clients have been asking and other people have been asking about this. It seems that something is changing at Y! More information as I hear it.

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Winning friends and removing blocks

I do a lot of negotiating with blocklists and ISPs on behalf of my clients and recently was dealing with two incidents. What made this so interesting to me was how differently the clients approached the negotiations.
In one case, a client had a spammer slip onto their system. As a result the client was added to the SBL. The client disconnected the customer, got their IP delisted from the SBL and all was good until the spammer managed to sweet talk the new abuse rep into turning his account back on. Predictably, he started spamming again and the SBL relisted the IP.
My client contacted me and asked me to intercede with Spamhaus. I received a detailed analysis of what happened, how it happened and how they were addressing the issue to prevent it happening in the future. I relayed the info to Spamhaus, the block was lifted and things are all back to normal.
Contrast that with another client dealing with widespread blocking due to a reputation problem. Their approach was to ask the blocking entity which clients they needed to disconnect in order to fix the problem. When the blocking entity responded, the customer disconnected the clients and considered the issue closed. They didn’t look at the underlying issues that caused the reputation problems, nor did they look at how they could prevent this in the future. They didn’t evaluate the customers they disconnected to identify where their processes failed.
The first client took responsibility for their problems, looked at the issues and resolved things without relying on Spamhaus to tell them how to fix things. Even though they had a problem, and is statistically going to have the occasional problem in the future, this interaction was very positive for them. Their reputation with the Spamhaus volunteers is improved because of their actions.
The second client didn’t do any of that. And the people they were dealing with at the blocking entity know it. Their reputation with the people behind the blocking entity was not improved by their actions.
These two clients are quite representative of what I’ve seen over the years. Some senders see blocking as a sign that somehow, somewhere there is a flaw in their process and a sign they need to figure out how to fix it. Others see blocking as an inconvenience. Their only involvement is finding out the minimum they need to do to get unblocked, doing it and then returning to business as usual. Unsurprisingly, the first type of client has a much better delivery rate than the second.

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