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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!

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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:

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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.

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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:

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Whitelisting

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

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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.

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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.

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Email Aptitude Test

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

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Images in email

There have been a number of blog posts recently discussing designing emails that look good and inspire clicks even when images are suppressed. Much of this is related to the EEC whitepaper showing that the majority of email users suppress images in emails and the 2008 email design guidelines published by Campaign Monitor.
I happen to be one of those cranky users who suppresses images by default, even in the emails with the cute bunny pictures. Up until about 3 years ago, I was using a mail reader that did not render images (or attachments). It is always interesting to me to watch how senders in general are reacting to the marketplace. Some senders have mail completely incomprehensible without images turned on. Their weekly (or more often!) email is a network of empty boxes on my screen.
For the most part, the emails are useless to me without images, and while I have occasionally loaded images or check the website, the emails are not that much better with images. I stay on the lists now as an informal study of how long it will take the sender to notice I have not opened, clicked or purchased from their emails.

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Mind filters

Stefan has a good article up at ClickZ about getting mail past the “mind filter”. 

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