Recent Posts

Negative brand building with email

Seth Godin compares and contrasts two different email campaigns he’s received. One is a opt-in campaign that is highly relevant to him. The other is spam, sent to two “discovered” email addresses. The whole post is very good, but there are a couple things he said that bear repeating.

AOL backlog

The AOL postmaster queue is backlogged from the recent upgrades. They are working through things as fast as possible, but have warned that they expect delays until they get caught back up.

Personal Contacts at ISPs: Part 2

I’ve talked quite a bit recently about working with ISPs and personal contacts. Today I have an example of what not to do.
One of my ISP friends informed me that another blogger published correspondence from an individual at that ISP, including the individual’s full contact information. The correspondence wasn’t a big deal, the blogger was assigned an IP address by their ISP that was previously used by a spammer. The ISP had a block on the address and he was contacting them to get the block removed. It was totally a misunderstanding on the blogger’s part and the blogger removed the info when the ISP contacted him. Still, once something is out on the net, it’s out there forever.
Don’t do that. Really. When someone at an ISP helps you, don’t go publishing their information on a blog somewhere. They will find out, even if it’s just because their mailbox explodes or their phone starts ringing off the hook with multiple calls about an “emergency” situation. It hurts the person who helped you, who now has to deal with a major increase in volume and work load, and they’re never going to help you again.
This also hurts the rest of us, as ISP employees retreat farther and farther away from contact with senders. Even those of us who are careful with contact information may find it hard to get responses when others in the field are spreading info around.
I know some ISPs can be difficult to get any information from. That’s part of my reason for publishing the ISP information page was to help people find the right contact information. I think it’s extremely important for delivery professionals to understand that you don’t need a personal contact at an ISP to resolve most issues. What you do need is a deep understanding of SMTP, a smattering of knowledge about DNS and HTTP, a firm grasp of privacy issues and an understanding of the dynamics of email.

ISP Postmaster Pages

I’ve been working on some reference information about ISPs for my own internal use as well as sharing with clients. There doesn’t seem to be any public reference site for postmaster sites, so I decided to publish what I’ve collected.

Can I use a purchased list?

Can I use a purchased list?
Thanks to the MailChimp folks for the great resource!

Landing pages

One thing I don’t talk about very much is what to do after mail has successfully been delivered to the inbox and the recipient has clicked on a link. Bronto Blog has a post from Friday with tips for successful landing pages.

Personal contacts at ISPs

A lot of senders seem to think that the secret to good delivery is having personal contacts at the ISPs. That way, when there is a delivery problem you can call up your friend at the ISP and inform them that they have made a mistake. In this little sender fantasy world, the ISP rep then apologizes profusely, unblocks the sender’s mail and perform magic to prevent a block from ever happening again.
Like many fantasies, it doesn’t usually happen that way.
The big ISPs are moving more and more to automated systems that prevent individual employees from interfering. This isn’t actually anything new. I was at a party once and sharing a drink with a representative of one of the big three ISPs. We were talking about a delivery problem one of my clients was having. The rep told me that the ISP did not have any way to actually whitelist around the filter that this client was getting trapped in. The reputation based filtering systems that some ISPs are building are much more performance based and will probably result in those ISPs who can make exceptions now not being able to do so in the future.
When looking for a good delivery person, the real question senders should be asking relate to the skills of the people doing the troubleshooting not who do they know. Does the delivery person have experience troubleshooting delivery? Can they actually resolve problems without having to rely on information from the ISPs? Given the response times at many ISPs, even for personal contacts, it’s often faster to listen to your delivery person than find the ISP rep who will apologize for the mistake.

Better Preheaders

Mark Brownlow has an article about using pre-header space better in your emails.

Lycos Europe shuts down

Multiple bloggers have commented on Lycos Europe shutting down. Some of them have linked to domains involved. One person, who wishes to remain anonymous, has sent me a list of domains which have a MX pointing at Lycos Europe. If you see a failure to resolve or connect to any of these domains in the coming weeks, you should remove all the email addresses at that domain from your lists. The list is about 500 domains, so they’re behind a cut.

Yahoo FBL returns

This morning ReturnPath and Yahoo announced the new Yahoo FBL has gone live. Signups are being accepted at http://feedbackloop.yahoo.net/. Yahoo provides the following instructions:
Yahoo! offers a Complaint Feedback Loop service, free of charge, via this site operated by Return Path. To begin the process: