In the last week or so both AOL and Yahoo have publicly made what some would consider big announcements.

Last week AOL officially announced that they are going to be implementing DKIM in the next couple of months as a part of their reputation calculations. As part of the industry group that helped put DKIM together and write the specs for this authentication method--this is great news for not only StrongMail but the industry as a whole.
According to AOL the main benefit of DKIM is flexibility and portability that’s just not there with just looking at the IP. So for shared IP’s they can look at the mail stream specifically. Provides infrastructure flexibility/portability it’s better for moving to new IP’s, reputation goes.

As for Yahoo!, they announced yesterday that they have partnered with Return Path to use their Sender Score Certified program as part of their reputation calculations. What does this mean, well we will have to wait and see exactly how this could affect their whitelisting procedures or any other filtering processes that they might use the SenderScore for. Stay tuned for any updates as they come.

You know I love how every month or so some company comes out with a new study about how they figured out the best day of the week to send emails to their customers. The great thing is that every study is different, one might say send on Monday because it is the beginning of the week, another says send on Friday because people are thinking less about work and getting ready for the weekend. So who is right, when is the best day? Well, as I always say, it depends on the sender. No two senders send to the same group of people so how could you possibly think something like the day of the week be the same for every mailer--it isn't. The other problem I have with these studies is that once someone says the best time to send is Wednesday at 9am, everyone is going to start doing it and then it doesn't seem like such a good idea because your customers are getting to much mail at that time. Once this happens the next study shows the best time is Thursday at 6pm, so everyone starts sending them. It is a vicious cycle. Needless to say my suggestion to you would be to test different times and days yourself and do what is best for your company and your customers, not what some report said this week. Good luck and happy sending.

There seemed to be alot of chatter and questions yesterday about an article that came out about how Yahoo has officially made it public that they are using the Spamhaus blocklist. What is interesting to me is that alot of people are looking at this as something new and that no one else was aware of until this article hit the wire. The problem is that they have been doing this for a short time and putting the information into their bounce codes. Not that legitimate senders need to work about this, but if something happened they should be aware of it as quickly as possible. That being said, with the StrongMail system we have been able to catch these bounces and categorizing them correctly, under blacklists, from the beginning.
I think back to the previous company that I worked for and with the system that we had at the time we probably would not have known about this either. So I suggest to everyone reading this blog that is not currently a StrongMail customer, ask your ESP about this and find out what they have in place to make sure that you are always covered by the ever changing world of ISPs.

For those of you that have been waiting to find out what I uncovered--here you go--enjoy.

The initial report stated that they were in fact getting 96.5% delivery. But, after examining the reports further, I noticed a line in the report that mentioned something about blocks. This block number was around 13.25%. Could this be? Was the ESP really counting a block as a delivered? Certainly not. If it got bounced by the ISP, why would anyone count it as a delivered?

I then asked the client for their perspective, and they explained to me that they were never exactly sure how deliverability was calculated, but they always thought it seemed fishy. With that, I decided to see if I could confirm that this was actually happening – because in my mind I was still thinking I was crazy for even thinking a respectable ESP would report things this way.

Finally, after looking through documentation and other items, we were able to confirm that my suspicion was correct. As I continued to think about this, I realized why so many senders have told me that deliverability is a “black art” or “voodoo." These marketers can not understand what deliverability really is because the “experts” in the field can’t even agree on what makes up a delivery rate, because in fact this ESP was counting blocked emails as delivered.

Needless to say I was quite upset that someone in this space would be, what I consider, untruthful with their clients. While I know a number of people at other ESPs, and I don’t believe that they all follow these types of practices, but it made me realize how important it really is having all the reporting in house so you don’t ever have to question the validity of the numbers.

Since entering the email marketing business several years back, I have seen and heard a lot of interesting things. One of the more interesting topics that comes up fairly often revolves around various ESPs not being completely honest about their delivery rates. While the issue comes up pretty frequently, I have never seen anything that proves it.

I was recently working with a client that had just installed their StrongMail system, and they were seeing around a 90% delivery rate. For most clients, I shoot for 95% or higher, so we were trying to figure out what we needed to do to bump this up. On top of everything, the client had numbers from their old ESP that said that they were getting a 96.5% delivery rate. So what could be the cause of this 6.5% difference if they are sending the same type of messages to the same list?

Those who know me, know that I can’t stand being out done by my competition. So needless to say, I did some serious digging to find out what could be happening. After a lot of research and banging my head against the wall, I finally got my hands on some of the reports for the mailings from their former ESP.

Come back next week and find out more.