Recent Posts

New Yahoo Domains

Yahoo announced two new email domains today.

Our local brewpub has an email list. For various reasons I have multiple addresses on the list and finally decided that getting 4 copies of each mailing was silly. About a week ago, I sent in unsubscribe requests for 3 of the addresses. Today I get another 4 copies of their mailing. That’s not good. Luckily, I know one of the delivery folks at their ESP so I send her an email.
I know unusubscribes can take a few days to process, but it has been seven and CAN SPAM is pretty clear about the 10 day requirement. My first email to their delivery expert is just asking how long unsbs normally take. She responds they take 3 – 4 days. Uh Oh.
I tell her I unsubscribed these 3 addresses (with the unsub links) on 6/10 and received more email this morning. I did tell her that there were multiple subscriptions and they were all legit, but the reasons were really not important. Just that I didn’t want quite so many emails and their unsubscribe process seemed broken.
Now we get to the part where it all goes a wee bit pear shaped. The next email I get back from her explains why I am on so many lists. Fair enough. The more concerning bit is that they have not only gone through their database and unsubscribed all my addresses, but they have also found Steve’s addresses and unsubscribed those too. What the email does not contain is an explanation of why their unsubscribe process broke.
At this point I am a bit annoyed. I did not want all my addresses unsubscribed, just some of them. And the bit about unsubscribing Steve? That’s just silly and unnecessary. Another round of email ensued, pointing out this is bad and please put everything back how it was except please unsubscribe these three addresses I sent originally.
Things are back how they were, although the technical staff is still looking into how their unsubscribe process broke. The initial thought is that during a technology transition they lost some unsubscribe requests.
This whole process has bothered me for a number of reasons. One is the utterly cavalier attitude of the delivery people at the ESP. Their unsubscribe process broke. This is, to my mind, an emergency. ESPs have been fined for broken unsubscribe processes. Two is the process of unsubscribing addresses that belonged to a completely different person. The ESP did explain the policy behind that, sorta.

Download Day

Today Firefox3 is released. The Mozilla Foundation is trying to set a record for number of downloads in a single day. Go download it!

Contradictions

In the span of 48 hours the following two things happened.
Josh Baer posts over on deliverability.com about GoDaddy’s policies and recommends no email marketer use GoDaddy as a registrar because they are so hostile to email marketing that they charge customers for complaints. To quote Josh:

Authenticating email in a court of law

Venkat has a discussion of authentication needed to present emails to a judge when asking for a summary judgment.

Email to mobile devices

There have been numerous blog posts about email to mobile devices, and making sure that your email displays well on the tiny screens with often lobotomized software. What few people have mentioned is the CAN SPAM laws related to sending mail to mobile devices.
While the FTC handles the bulk of the regulation related to CAN SPAM the FCC is responsible for regulating email sent to wireless devices. The act requires the FCC protect consumers from “unwanted mobile service commercial messages.” To that end there are specific regulations that apply to email sent to domains used exclusively for mobile devices that do not apply to messages that go out to non-mobile domains.
A summary of the FCC rules can be found at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/policy/canspam.html. The FCC describes the ban to consumers thusly:

Whitelisting

Derek has a really good article on whitelisting and what it means over at ClickZ.

Postini makes a statement

I was looking for some info on Postini for a client recently and discovered a statement on their website telling senders not to bother them.

Delivery percentages

Some of my customers use one of the mailbox monitoring services out there. One of them consistently has 97% or better inbox delivery. On those few occasions when their delivery drops to 90%, they contact me to find out what the problem is. This happened recently and I spent some time digging through their delivery logs to see what I could determine.
The logs are showing that all the mail to domainA is delivered, except for 6 addresses sitting in the delayed email queue. Those six addresses are the exact addresses that the monitoring company uses. At domainB I see something similar, all the mail has been delivered except for mail to the monitoring addresses. In this case, domainB is deferring the mail with a rejection message that says too much email is being sent to these addresses and the domain is throttling them.
The important thing to remember about this is that the 100% missing statistic only says that the mail to the monitoring addresses is missing, it says nothing about mail to the actual list subscribers. In this case, I can see that the mail is not missing, it’s sitting in the outbound queue waiting to be retried.
Mark Brownlow has an ongoing series about using the right language when talking about delivery.

Email Aptitude Test

MailChimp has an email aptitude test. How did you fare?