Email Deliverability Conversations

Comcast had a DNS outage this weekend, affecting many of their East Coast customers.  What this means for you is that you'll see an increase in bounces to Comcast from your weekend sends. 

If you use Twitter, Comcast Will will keep you up-to-date. 

Update: Comcast believes this to be resolved, but will continue to monitor for future problems.

Escalated spam complaints go well beyond a normal spam complaint.  They have nothing to do with volume on the account   It’s not just someone who hit the “This is Spam Button.”   It’s like the canary in the coal mine.  If we’re just removing the people who send escalated spam complaints, then we don’t have the critical insight that they give us into the big problems. 

If a company spams me personally and I email their ESP, that ESP considers my complaint an escalated spam complaint because I am a trusted source of data.  They know that I absolutely did not opt in for a company’s...

We come across all manner of email hosting solutions when helping customers get their email through.  I had the pleasure last week of working with Red Condor for a customer whose email appeared to be disappearing for a few of their recipients.  Red Condor is an outsourcing solution for email.  They give their administrators and end users a lot of control over the final disposition of the email.  Red Condor was one of the best companies for us to work with to resolve inbox deliverability.

As it turns out, Red Condor marks all bulk email, whether its transactional or marketing, in the subject...

Coming close on the tails of Hotmail's Sweep, where Hotmail allows their users to sweep away everything from one sender, show only email from their contacts, and a couple of other neat inbox management features, Google announced yesterday that they're releasing Priority Inbox for Gmail.

Priority Inbox will split the inbox into three panes:

• Important and unread
• Starred to read later
• Everything else

(AD) - Add it to your subject line.

163.com, 126.com, 188.com, vip.163.com netease.com, and yeah.net are all under the umbrella of NetEase.  NetEase would like for senders who are mailing them advertisements to preface their email subject lines with (AD). 

What happens if you don't?  Well, it's possible that you'll get blocked with a message similar to this one:

554 MI:SPB 0,mx43,WcCowKCrd3S20MRL0ck6BQ--.81S2 1271189687 http://mail.163.com/help/help_spam_16.htm?ip=66.231.XX.XX&hostid=mx43&time=1271189687::2::2002::000

If you're having problems sending to NetEase and not sending using this tag...

Yesterday, a friend found a terrible post about bounces.  We talk about looking at your bounces and understanding what they mean in regards to your list health, but what are bounces and why should you care?

There are a few types of bounces.  The two main types are hard bounces and soft bounces.  Bounces are based off the SMTP reply codes that we receive back from your recipients' mail servers.  When we get the reply code, we bucket that response into a category.  Our bounce processing actually goes a bit farther than just looking at the SMTP response code and examines the text of the response...

New Zealand has had enough of businesses and individuals not paying attention to their anti-spam laws.  They had been going with educational efforts, but they're fed up now.  Fines for spamming, either via email or SMS, are $200,000 for an individual or $500,000 for a business.

If you're a New Zealand resident and you're getting spam, you can file a complaint with the Department of Internal Affairs.

If you're sending to New Zealand residents, make sure you're honoring unsubscribes or it can cost you up to a cool half-million.

Countries all over the world are fed up.  ET handles your unsubs...

Lycos is migrating their customers onto a new mail system.  This new system uses a different type of spam filtering than their old system.  It's an adaptive spam filter that will let their users be able to decide what is and is not spam, adjusting its settings for each individual user. 

What's an adaptive spam filter?  It's a bit like the spam filter used in Thunderbird or Mac OS X Mail.  Similar to Bayesian spam filters, they learn based on what each individual person's preferences are rather than on a group's determination (complaints and user engagement models).  Each time a person clicks...

Many of you knew that AOL was going to be doing more layoffs.  Unfortunately, AOL's US Postmaster team was hit very hard this time.  Their frontline support will still be handling many of the cases, but there is only one non-programming individual handling escalations.  Please be patient if you are experiencing problems with AOL, as Anna will be working quite hard over the coming weeks to get to as many cases as she can.

Domain Name Service

Just a quick post today for more advanced senders.  When you're sending email, sometimes you need to understand things other than SMTP - Simple Mail Transport Protocol (what we use to send email).  There are a lot of other internet protocols involved in getting your email from one place to another.  DNS is one of them.  DNS is involved in EVERY online interaction.  It's very technical, can be difficult to understand and even harder to explain. 

When you're trying to understand or explain to someone about sender authentication (Sender ID, SPF, DomainKeys, DKIM), it can seem...

I admit it.  I am, at heart, a gamer.  I always have been.  I always will be.  I got hit by the bug early in high school with AD&D and it hasn't left me since.

I am also opposed to spam, in its many forms.  Unfortunately, sometimes these two things intersect and one of the things has to give way.  I'm pretty sure you can figure out which one it is.  You may think I'm talking about Zynga, but I'm not.  Although their games have had to give way recently because of their practices.  I'm talking about another game. 

Guild Wars.  I bought Guild Wars back when it came out and have played it on and...

Dearest mailer,

My fearless leader Phil Schott pointed me at this Ken Magill article today.  It's all about blame.  Who really is responsible when your email gets blocked?  We've been together for so long and there's so much that we could point to. 

I don't want to talk about blame.  I gave up blame for Lent one year and never picked it up again.  I replaced it with personal responsibility and owning my actions.  Since I can't own your actions, I can't own all the responsibility for your email getting blocked.  Blocking happens for a very select number of reasons.  I will own responsibility if...

Do you ever feel like you're outside in the cold, looking in on someone else's wonderful celebration?  Is that what you felt like this weekend, when you looked at your Yahoo test box and saw other people's emails being delivered yet yours were delayed?  It's not fair!  You send good email.  You get low complaints.  Your users are engaged.  This cannot be!

When I worked in network abuse, the department responsible for stopping spam coming out from ISPs, I hated this time of year.  You pretty well work from Thanksgiving straight through to New Year’s including weekends, along with the mail...

My dear friend Annalivia, who has been a postmaster at AOL for many years, has a muse that rarely gets out in her day-to-day work.  When I mentioned my pre-Christmas posts, she jumped at the chance to add something poetic.  I admit our pre-Christmas workload increases quite a bit and I have not been as good about posting as I should have been.  You can thank Anna for getting me motivated again.

Cox made some changes to their mail servers this morning, leading to some accidental blocks this morning that we understand were not actually listed on the dnsbl referenced.  Other sources have confirmed that these blocks were wide-spread and accidental. 

Cox seems to have this resolved now and our tests show that previously blocked emails are now being delivered.   They responded to earlier cases and asked that customers who had email blocked this morning to try resending their blocked messages.

On Thursday, October 29th,...

When my nephew was much younger, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas together on VHS until the tape broke.  He even thought his name was Jack the Pumpkin King!  The soundtrack will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life. 

Not only is this one of the best movies of all time, but it's a wonderful commentary on the state of email marketing during the holiday season.  I don't just mean that trying to get email delivered is a nightmare starting around Halloween or that marketers find themselves in somewhat different situations than they're used to during the rest of the year.  The flow of...