Let's Play the E-mail Blame Game!

OK readers, time for a pop quiz: It’s the middle of the fourth-quarter Christmas-shopping season and suddenly you’re experiencing deliverability troubles with your outbound commercial e-mail. This being a business issue, rather than simply tackle the problem, we must assign blame first.

The blame for your e-mail troubles primarily should be placed on:

A) Your e-mail service provider (After all, they said their delivery rates were among the highest in the industry. Liars. Pants on fire.)

B) The e-mail inbox providers who are bouncing your mail (You’re Can-Spam compliant, so they should be delivering your messages no questions asked, right? Let’s sue the bastards.)

C) Anti-spam zealots who run blocklists, such as Spamhaus (Who appointed those holier-than-thou weenies to police the online world, anyway? Let’s sue the bastards.)

D) The real spammers (Yeah, they ruin everything, don’t they?)

E) You (Who, me?)

F) Your boss (I told that barnyard idiot we shouldn’t be mailing 18-month-old names. Now I’ve got to make some phone calls and clean up after his/her sorry ass.)

The correct answers are, of course, E and F, and since you’re reading this newsletter it’s probably F.

Amid reports that e-mail deliverability issues are up, experts from two leading e-mail service providers confirm that, yes, there has been a predictable surge in deliverability problems, but the marketers who are experiencing them are those who, for the most part, have failed to follow best practices.

“I’m not seeing so much of an issue this year as opposed to any other year,” said Robert Consoli, director of deliverability for ESP Silverpop. “It’s very cyclical. Each [Christmas] shopping season, ISPs hunker down and tweak their filters to be more aggressive because they know they’re going to have a higher volume of e-mails coming in.”

He added that clients who are having delivery troubles are generally those who have reached too far back into their files and mailed a bunch of old, inactive names in hopes of squeezing a few more sales out of their lists.

“It could be that the economy is exacerbating that a bit this year because there’s more of a need to get to every last person they can possibly get to,” he said. “But you couple a really large, really old mailing with more aggressive filters and you’re going to have a pretty good collision.”

Consoli recommends against mailing to names that are more than a year old.

“Preferably in the six-months range,” he said. Why? For one thing, ISPs turn abandoned addresses into spam traps. Also, people who haven’t heard from a marketer in a long time may forget they signed up for mailings and press the “report-spam” button. Both of these issues can get a marketer’s messages blocked.

“Almost every client I’ve spoken with so far [concerning deliverability issues] has said ‘Well, we did start to push our list practices a little bit in the past week or past month,’” said Consoli, adding the problem is generally with management. “They know exactly what they’re doing and they’re doing it intentionally, but the command is coming from higher up. They just push the button.”

Rick Buck, director of privacy and ISP relations for ESP eDialog said his clients have experienced a slight uptick in fourth-quarter soft bounces—where the recipient’s server bounces the sender’s message back because of a temporary problem, such as a server down or network outage—but for the most part their mail is getting through.

He added it’s important for marketers to understand what ISPs are dealing with when sorting incoming mail.

“If you think of all the mail ISPs get as a yard stick, the mail that’s coming out of eDialog and everybody else we compete with is probably the first quarter inch of that yardstick,” he said. “The other 35 and three-quarter inches of that yardstick is everything they’re trying to make not happen.

“Sometimes, we [marketers who work to adhere to e-mail best practices] get caught in the crossfire, but I do feel the ISPs’ pain,” he added.