AOL Postmaster Updates

The AOL postmaster blog announced some more changes to the postmaster site. They have updated what had been their best practices to be their delivery requirements , and have introduced a new sender best practices page. According to the article "Failure to meet any of these [delivery] requirements will result in delivery issues."

MAAWG Updated Sender Best Communications Practices

MAAWG (Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group) has released an updated version of their Sender Best Communications Practices document. MAAWG is largely comprised of ISPs, blacklist providers, and others in the anti-spam community, so I like to think of this document as a roadmap for deliverability.

Email Equality

I have a friend that sells window treatments. The company he works for goes to people’s homes, show samples, take measurements, and then leave and put the orders through later. As part of this process, they tell their customers to expect an email order confirmation letting them know that the order has processed. According to my friend the company doesn’t send any types of email apart from these order confirmations, however they find themselves blocked or on blacklists.

Conventional wisdom seems to say that transactional messages are more highly relevant and therefore less likely to be complained about. Most experts, even MAAWG, often recommend that these transactional messages be placed on IP addresses dedicated only to those emails. Because they are highly relevant, it is thought that complaints are unlikely to occur, bounce rates will be low, there will be few trap hits, etc., but is that really the case? Also, given the sporadic sending patterns of transactional messages, what impact will that have on deliverability at the major ISPs that factor that into the deliverability secret sauce? I think that perhaps a better way of looking at this isn’t, "which of my emails is most important to be delivered," but rather, "every point of contact we have via email is an important opportunity to engage subscribers."

Segregating email is much like segregating people, separate but equal seldom exists. If you look at your email program and split it up so that certain types of email have better deliverability than others, you are inherently saying, "this type of email is bad and this one good," and quite possibly inherently excusing practices that can affect deliverability and even your relationship with your subscribers. If practices in one branch of your email program are being segregated because they would negatively impact deliverability to other parts of your program, maybe the answer is to fix the underlying problems with that part of the program rather than segregating your email.

AOL disables links by default

AOL postmaster blog had a post stating that they released a new version of their webmail last week that defaults to blocking links as well as images. Read all about it here. Things like this make it even more important that readers add you to their personal whitelists, and that you establish a trustworthy and relevant reputation with your reader base. Links will have to be enabled before even a "view this email in a web browser" link will work.