Industry News

News from the Email Marketing and deliverability Industry as well as news on trends on email use.

Delivery to Yahoo! over the past few days.

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2 years ago
by EmailManual in , ,

Over the past few days Email Manual has received a couple of reports that delivery attempts to yahoo email accounts have resulted in bounce messages being returned by Yahoo quoting that the recipient was on the spamhaus PBL blocklist.

Upon investigation, Email Manual has found a post on the yahoo postmaster site with the following information:-

some senders are seeing intermittent IP blocks when sending to Yahoo! Mail, with the SMTP error message from us citing that the block was due to a Spamhaus listing — e.g., “553 5.7.1 [BL21] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus PBL.” (See our full list of SMTP error messages at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/ .)

If your IPs are currently not listed on any Spamhaus blocklist but you are seeing this error, please be assured that we are looking into the matter.

Whilst this doesn’t appear to affect all senders or even the affected senders all of the time Yahoo are working on this error. This may result in higher than usual bounce rates on campaigns going to yahoo based addresses and this should be taken into consideration when reflecting on your campaign reports.

Email Manual will post again when the issue has been resolved and confirmed by Yahoo.

Update 05/06/09 – Yahoo claim pbl issue resolved.

Cox Feedback loop suspended.

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2 years ago
by EmailManual in , ,

Cox communications a very large US based ISP have recently suspended their feedback loop.

A feedback loop is a way of an ESP or marketing department to know how many spam complaints they are getting from subscribers and automatically unsubscribe them from their lists to ensure that their spam complaint percentage remains low to ensure good future deliverability to subscribers who do wish to continue to receive their mailings.

The feedback loop website at http://fbl.cox.net now says “Thank you for your interest in the Cox Feedback Loop Service. However, at the present time, we are no longer accepting applications for new feedback loops. Note that this is a temporary change, and we do plan to offer new signups again in the near future, but currently a specific date is not known. Please check back here periodically for updates.”

There are rumours around the internet that applications for the feedback loop service are still being approved but months after the applications have been made. This would indicate that cox have been swamped by the shear amount of applications being made and they have closed their service to be able to clear the backlog.

If you have applied and not yet received your approval email, don’t panic the chances are your application will still be approved. If you have not yet applied, Email Manual will post again to let you know when the service has been resumed and applications are being accepted.

Googlemail creates tool to try and take some Hotmail and Yahoo market share.

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2 years ago
by EmailManual in ,

Googlemail aka Gmail yesterday announced on its blog that it was to remove one of the most common excuses for consumers not switching email providers, “It’s too difficult to switch”.

Google have done this through making a new tool available within the newly named “accounts and import” tab which allows new users to import both emails and contacts from their existing accounts. Nearly 50 existing domains are supported from the launch of the tool. A full list is available on googlemail help here. The list includes Microsoft’s hotmail and Yahoo!, two of google’s biggest webmail competitors.

The new feature is not yet rolled out to all existing gmail accounts but google have said it will be slowly rolled out to all users.

Massive percentage of consumers are suppressing your images.

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2 years ago
by EmailManual in , ,

At EmailManual we don’t normally post about content or html related issues but instead focus on the more technical elements of email, this time we are making an exception.

Approximately half of all consumers have images turned off by default according to a study by the email experience council.

This statistic shows that marketers need to ensure they are using text effectively within their email marketing content in addition to images. Having text with a call to action or targeted offer will encourage the reader to allow images to be displayed within their email which will also register as an email open if you use email open tracking and failing to do this may result in your email being simply deleted or worse, the “this is spam” button being clicked.

One of the easy wins, if you do not want to redesign your content is to use alt tags. These are html snippets within your email which will show a word or sentence when an image can not be displayed. By doing this you give your subscribers who block images by default a chance to decide whether the content is relevant to them and allow the images to display. Without text surrounding your images or alt tags your subscribers will only see empty boxes where your images were supposed to be and this will result in your email not being read and just deleted.

Seems simple enough? We thought so too but surprisingly in a separate study titled ‘Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study’ from the email experience council showed that :-

“Only 42% of the 104 top online retailers included in our study designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63% used alt tags adequately or extensively.”

Email Manual recommendations:

  • Use a good mix of text and images, don’t include your text within the images.
  • Use alt tags for your images where appropriate.
  • Trial sending your emails with embedded images rather than linked *

* N.B the figure you should look at here will be your clickthrough or conversation rates and not your open rate, if the images are embedded within the content and the only image that is linked is the open tracking image then users will not see the need to allow the image through and therefore you can reasonably expect a slightly reduced open rate but you may also see a higher clickthrough and conversion rate.

If you want to see more results from the ‘Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study’ you can read the executive summary here.

Online Trust Alliance shows more than 50% of .Gov domains do not comply with Email Authentication Standards

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2 years ago
by EmailManual in , , ,

Further to yesterdays article on fortune 500 companies and US government domains and their non-compliance to adhere to widely used email authentication standards we thought you might like to see the Online Trust Alliance findings for the .gov domains.

Government Agencies such as the Whitehouse, Secret Service and the Federal Communications Commission all fail to adhere to these standards.

A full list of .Gov domains which were analyzed is available from the OTA here.

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