Getting Email Delivered - the ISIPP SuretyMail Blog

The results of a recent survey released by eROI show that a shocking almost 20% of email marketers don’t bother to track their open rates and click-through rates (CTR).

We have an invitation for all of your email deliverability professionals. In fact, I announced this yesterday on Twitter, and was asked “What’s an email deliverability professional?” Which is why there is a need for email deliverability forums - a forum specifically for email deliverability professionals.

We’ve touched on this briefly before, but I think that it’s time to make it crystal clear: ISPs do not have to accept and deliver email - any email - your email - even if it isn’t spam.

A New York court yesterday affirmed that New York can charge sales tax on sales made through affiliates who are based in New York state. Known as “The Amazon Tax”, and indeed the primary plaintiff in the case was Amazon, the rule says that so long as the affiliate is located in New York, and the company for whom the sales are generated has sales of at least $10,000 attributable to affiliates in New York, then the company must pay sales tax to the state of New York.

I thought that our readers might find this interesting. Last week we put out a press release about how despite the general economic situation here in the U.S., Internet businesses in general, and the email industry in particular, is booming. So many of my colleagues, and our own customers, are so busy that they need to hire just to keep up with the pace and demand!

A fascinating, and a bit shocking, study was released today, rating how well online commerce sites do when it comes to responding to prospect and customer email queries. Not very, it turns out.

We recently had one of our email accreditation customers ask us whether we would contact all of the blacklists listed at on a particular site on their behalf, because the site listed their IP address’ reputation with these blacklists as “neutral”.

Every so often we run into a sender who has a sense of entitlement - or even righteous indignation - about how an ISP should, must - even has to - accept their email. Whether because it’s “requested” or opt-in or because it “complies with CAN-SPAM”, the sender gets all in our face about how a given ISP has a responsiblity and duty to accept their email. Sometimes they even rant that it’s required by {CAN-SPAM| tort law | the 1st Amendment | insert your favourite rant here}. Except, that’s completely wrong.

Many of our customers come to us concerned about one thing above all else: whitelisting. And, you can find email service providers who tout right on their front page “We are whitelisted with many major ISPs.” Indeed, getting whitelisted used to be the holy grail of email delivery. Did you catch that? Used to be.

I’m sure that you know that more and more people are reading email on the go (I, for example, read a large percentage of my email on my Sidekick, many others read email on their Blackberrys). In fact last year Marketing Sherpa determined that 64% of key decision makers are reading email on their mobile devices. Reading your email on their mobile devices. Have you ever stopped to think about what that means in terms of your email deliverability?

We recently had a customer muse to us “I think there’s got to be a phone number at the ISP that we could call, so we can ask them to explain the reason we are being sent to the junk folder.” As most of you who read this probably know, well, there isn’t such a phone number. But why not?

This has been a long time coming.

We’ve been asked and asked to do this, and so now we finally are.

The Email Sending Secrets Insiders Circle.

Challenge response systems have been around long enough now that pretty much everybody has an opinion on them. The end users who use challenge response systems seem to love them. But legitimate email senders often never respond to challenges, and so the end users are actually missing out on a lot of wanted email.

Many email senders rage against the machine - the spam filtering machine, that is. And it’s easy to understand why: legitimate email getting caught and misidentified as spam - what we call “false positives” - is a big problem. But, consider this: what would the email world look like without spam filters?

We got the following in the mail this week from United Airlines: “Watch your email during the week at August 11 to receive a valuable limited-time offer from United for international travel this fall.” Something has gone horribly wrong when in order for an email marketing campaign to be effective, you first have to send your customers something via the post office to alert them to watch their inbox.

This came into my inbox today. This is an example of just about everything we tell you not to do here. And this is a company that is going to have serious deliverability problems.

Many are asking me what do I think about - and indeed, how do I feel about - this morning’s announcement that ReturnPath is acquiring Habeas, the company which I helped to found. And, was I surprised?

One of the most frustrating things for commercial and volume email senders is that different ISPs have different standards for what they require in order to ensure that your email gets delivered. On top of that, many ISPs don’t seem to adhere to the agreed industry standards in terms of how their receiving mail servers interact with the sending mail servers - for example five different ISPs may use five different SMTP error codes when they bounce an email because the email address doesn’t exist, even though people believe there to be one generally accepted code for that situation (along the lines of “550 user unknown”).

A couple of things happened today which reminded me that a) we’re all in this together, and b) not everybody realizes or feels that we’re all in this together. What I mean is that legitimate email senders and ISPs really want the same thing: they want to not send or deliver email to people who really don’t want it, and they want email that is wanted to be delivered to the people who do want it.

One of our mottos is “In all things, be honourable.” I demand it of our employees. We insist on it with our customers. I strive for it in my personal interactions. And I expect it of others in our industry. Unfortunately, and always to my surprise (as I am eternally pollyannic), my expectations for honourable behaviour among our colleagues and competitors are not always met.