Recent Posts

Getting whitelisted by endusers

One of the best ways to ensure mail is delivered to a recipients inbox is to encourage the recipient to add the senders from: address to their address book. In cases where an ISP might otherwise bulk folder the email, they will instead put the email into the inbox.
Senders are changing their practices to get recipients to add from addresses to address books. There are a number of companies reminding users to add addresses on the webpage at the time of signup. Most emails have recommendations in each email. Recently, there have been multiple reports of companies who send specific email campaigns to encourage recipients to whitelist the sender.
Cool Email Idea: Customized Whitelisting Instructions from ReturnPath.
How & Why You Need to be Added to Your Recipient’s Address Book from VerticalResponse.
In addition to the direct benefit to the recipient that whitelists the individual sender, there are some hints that ISPs are looking at individual whitelisting as part of their internal sender reputation scoring.

Updates on upcoming AOL FBL changes

Annalivia posted more information over on the AOL Postmaster blog about the upcoming conversion of the AOL FBL to ARF only. Specifically, she provides instructions for how to read the FBL emails in different email clients.

Delivery Haikus

As we mentioned earlier Habeas is being bought out by ReturnPath.
While they’ve not actually used it for several years the thing that Habeas will be remembered for is their introduction of the Haiku form of poetry into email headers:

ReturnPath acquires Habeas

This morning ReturnPath announced they had acquired Habeas.
Goodbye Habeas.
What have you left? Just footprints
in snow as spring comes.

Letting Go

Derek Harding has an article over at ClickZ, discussing the importance of letting subscribers go.

Backscatter

The term backscatter describes the email an innocent victim receives when a spammer forges the victim’s email address into a spam run. The amount of mail involved can be just a few emails or can range into the hundreds of thousands of emails. Terry Zink recently wrote an 18 part series on backscatter. It is well worth a read.

Delivery thoughts

I have spent quite a bit of time over the last few days working with new clients who are asking a lot of basic, but insightful questions about delivery problems. I have been trying to come up with a model of how spam filtering works, to help them visualize the issue and understand how the different choices they make change, either for better or worse, their delivery.
One model that I have been using is the bucket model. Spamfilters are like buckets. Everything a sender does that looks like what spammers do adds water to the bucket. Reputation is a hole in the bottom of the bucket that lets some of the water flow out. When the bucket overflows, delivery is impacted.
I think this analogy helps explain why fixing any technical issues is so important. The less water that is added to the bucket by technical problems, the less likely it is that the water from content filters will overflow the bucket.

Strategic email marketing

Mark Brownlow has an interview with Simms Jenkins the author of The Truth about Email Marketing. Well worth a read for anyone who is sending email.

Addictive email marketing

Magilla Marketing had an article this week about Bob Richards, who paid $14,000 to an email appending company, only to discover that of the 118,000 email addresses he received over 85,000 of them bounced. Mr. Richards was also terminated from his email service provider due to bounces and complaints. He posted a complaint on RipOffReport.com, issued a press release and reported the appending company to the FTC and other law enforcement.
In his press release, Mr. Richards equates his vendor, and other vendors to email marketers, with drug pushers.

Engaging recipients critical for delivery

One of the issues I have touched on repeatedly is the changing face of blocking and filtering at ISPs. Over the last 12 – 18 months, large, end-user ISPs have started rolling out more and more sophisticated filters. These filters look at a lot of things about an email, not just the content or the sending IP reputation or URLs in the message but also the recipient profile. Yes, ISPs really are measuring how engaged recipients are with a sender and, they are using that information to help them make blocking decisions.
There were two separate posts on Friday related to this.
Mark Brownlow has a great blog post speculating about a number of things ISPs might be looking at when making decisions about what to do with an incoming email. He lists a number of potential measurements, some of which I can definitively confirm are being measured by ISPs.