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MAAWG: Sender Best Practices

The MAAWG Sender Subcommittee has published a Sender Best Current Practices document.
This document details what the current best practices in the sending industry are. Summarized the document says:

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Busy Busy.

Getting ready to head to MAAWG next week. We leave for the plane in a couple hours. I expect there will be some interesting information coming out of the talks and sessions and will be sharing some of the more interesting bits throughout the week.
Also, Steve has written a new tool to visualize blacklists. He’s put up a beta version. It still has a few bugs and missing features, but there are already some interesting patterns in XBL data with it.
The demo installation only displays XBL data (rather than letting you overlay multiple datasets) and is missing search and bookmarking, amongst other things. Enough disclaimers yet?

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More on Relevancy

Al Iverson comments on information from Craig Spiezel at the Exacttarget customer conference this week. Craig confirms that MSN/Hotmail is also looking at user engagement, opens and moving mail out of the spam folder as part of their delivery metrics.

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Yahoo blocks unauthenticated PayPal and eBay Mail

Yahoo announced this morning that over the course of the next few weeks Yahoo would roll out a new feature to their email that blocks any unauthenticated email from eBay and PayPal.
In a blog post Nikki Dugan says:

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Blocklists and standards

I received a comment this morning on my post about e360 v. Spamhaus, which I think brings up a point that deserves a post of it’s own. Skinny says:

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Relevance: don't underestimate it, measure it.

Ken Magill has an article today about a new service from e-Dialog called the Relevancy Trajectory. This product

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Marketing and Delivery blogs

Mark Brownlow links to a number of marketing and delivery blogs over at his website. Different perspectives and different thoughts will give you the tools to create the best email marketing campaign for your business.

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Mailing to corporate domains

One of the struggles of delivery consulting is doing ISP relations and problem resolution for clients attempting to mail to corporate domains. The rules for getting mail into ISPs are generally pretty clear, and if they’re not I can typically find someone there who will give me the time of day. At corporate domains, though, all bets are off.
While ISPs strive to deliver wanted mail to their customers while protecting them from spam, businesses have different goals for email. For most businesses email is a tool. Mail boxes belong to the business, not the employee. In many cases, businesses do allow personal use of email so some marketing mail to employees is acceptable. However, if a corporation blocks personal marketing email, they are less likely than commercial ISPs to let even legitimate email through.
Large corporations typically run their own mail systems. Once a sender is blocked, however, the corporation will not unblock their email unless the sender can demonstrate that the mail is business related.
Smaller businesses typically use commercial appliances or filtering services. In these cases there is less need to justify the business related nature of email. Unfortunately, some commercial filters do not listen to senders or provide block resolution. At least one filter claims that the only way you can deliver mail to their users is for the users themselves to whitelist the sender.
Businesses of all types are much more security conscious than home users. Some “spam” blocking may be more related to security than actual spam. Finally, there are workplace and environment issues. Companies may be liable under the hostile workplace laws if they allow porn or other offensive emails into their employee mailboxes. One company I know of blocks any email with the word “viagra” in it. The email administrator of said company says that in the years this block has been in place there has only been one false positive… and that employee was told his wife should not use that word when emailing him shopping lists in the future.
All of these issues make it difficult to troubleshoot delivery problems at corporations.

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Think about that subject line

Ken Magill talks about a study done by People magazine on the importance of subject lines and from lines in getting recipients to open and act on an email.
MailChimp has specific open information about mail sent through their application. They describe the collection of the information used in this blog post.
Recipients really do make open / not-open decisions based just on the visible subject line. MailChimp’s data shows that “boring” subject lines often perform better than pushier more sales like subject lines. One possible explanation is that recipients are used to ignoring spam subject lines, and the more informative a subject line, the more likely it is to be mail they actually open.

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More on Truthout

Ken Magill comments on the reaction of truthout.org to being blocked by AOL and Hotmail.
I do agree with Al, if both AOL and Hotmail are blocking your email, then you’re doing something wrong.

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