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.
Email Deliverability Conversations
AOL
has been having some problems with inbound delivery that you can
read about over on their
Postmaster blog. This started a few weeks back with a
small number of clients, tapered off, and is starting to bubble up
again. You may see your AOL customers bouncing. AOL is
making big changes and that can mean big growing pains. This is not affecting everyone, but it does seem to be growing. We are working through one of our partners to provide information to AOL to help with resolving this problem. They are helping to aggregate data from many sources to expedite a solution. While no ETA or...Read More »
Over
the past few weeks, I've been posting about
escalated
spam complaints. They're scary things to have
happen. What can you do to avoid getting them? List
hygiene goes a long way. In this day and age, we're used
to having our every action turned into a
number. When you look at those numbers all day long, it
can be easy to forget that each complaint you receive is sent by a
person making a concious decision to complain about your
mailings. Escalated spam complaints come from
treating people like numbers.As part of your regular email campaign management there are a few things that you...Read More »
In my last post, I talked about something very scary -
the escalated spam complaint. When one
spam complaint can point out an underlying problem in your list
practices that shakes the foundations of your entire email
marketing campaign. If you get an escalated spam complaint,
someone from Deliverability will reach out to you personally and
walk you through what needs to be done. For your part, you
need to respond quickly.
The two most common reasons for getting one of these is appending your list or sending to very old lists. Both of these practices can cause you to send to spamtraps....Read More »
The two most common reasons for getting one of these is appending your list or sending to very old lists. Both of these practices can cause you to send to spamtraps....Read More »
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...
Read More »
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.
Read More »
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...
Mark
Brownlow blogged about, among other fascinating things in a
series on what email users say, why people unsubscribe. What
was top reason?
Drum roll please.....
Merkle's View from the Inbox reports that recipients unsubscribe are
75% - Sending me stuff I don't care about
73% - Way too many "valuable offers"
Epsilon's Global Consumer Email Survey says North American consumers unsub because:
Sending me junk I don't care about
There's links to more studies there and guess what they say. These studies are nicer about phrasing it, as is Mark. I call it nicer things all the time, but what it...Read More »
Drum roll please.....
Merkle's View from the Inbox reports that recipients unsubscribe are
75% - Sending me stuff I don't care about
73% - Way too many "valuable offers"
Epsilon's Global Consumer Email Survey says North American consumers unsub because:
Sending me junk I don't care about
There's links to more studies there and guess what they say. These studies are nicer about phrasing it, as is Mark. I call it nicer things all the time, but what it...Read More »
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.
On the nights before Christmas...when the relays are groaning under the loads
and ISP admins start to turn into toads
they tear out their hair and cry in despair
"why's all this mail coming out of thin... Read More »
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,...
Read More »
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...
