Recent Posts

Blog Olympics – Passing on the stick

Given that it is August and a lot of people are on vacation and it seems to be a general low point in getting things done at work, I expect blogging to be light through the end of the month. Once everyone gets back in September, I will have a more substantive posts up more regularly. Happily, EmailKarma helped me with a somewhat fluffy post today. He tagged me into the Blog Olympics meme. The rules say I am supposed to pick 7 blogs I read and tag them forward. The rules also state that I have to link back to the blog that passed on the stick to me but I cannot add it to the list of my favorite 7 blogs.
I limited my picks to email related blogs. Now, in no particular order (vaguely the order they show up in my RSS feed, but nothing actually that specific):

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Upcoming Conferences

EmailKarma lists a number of upcoming events for email marketers and delivery folks.

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RoadRunner FBL changes

RoadRunner announced changes to their FBL this morning. Everyone who is currently getting a FBL should have received an email. Important dates to remember include the following.
August 28: Existing RR FBL will be frozen. No changes to existing loops will be accepted and no new FBL applications will be processed. All current FBLs will continue to work.
November 17 (tentative): The new FBL will go live. Existing FBLs will not be converted from the old FBL to the new one. Everyone wishing to be a part of the new FBL will be required to re-enroll in the program beginning on this date.
December 31 (tentative): The old FBL ceases to exist.
More information about the migration is available at http://postmaster.rr.com/FBL.html

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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.

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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.

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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:

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ReturnPath acquires Habeas

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

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Letting Go

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

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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.

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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.

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