A Marketer’s Field Guide to Comcast Inboxes

Comcast is the largest cable provider in the United States with 22 million subscribers comprising 32 million active mailboxes. Their email user base is made up of paid subscribers to their Internet service. Comcast provides a reliable email service with lots of storage. Unlike other North American cable providers, Comcast has invested significantly in their email service which includes a snappy Zimbra-based web interface.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to Yahoo! Inboxes

Yahoo! Mail was one of the first free webmail providers to hit the market and is one of the three largest providers in the world with 280+ million users. If you include some of the smaller providers that utilize the Yahoo! infrastructure such as AT&T and BellSouth there are 320+ million users. Even though they are one of the oldest and biggest ISPs in the market they have continued to attract and cater to a relatively young social audience compared to other free webmail providers. Yahoo!’s anti-spam team is also one of the most active and responsive groups in the industry when it comes to clear communications and responsiveness to senders.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to ISPs and Deliverability

Email marketers are intensely focused on ROI for their marketing dollars. Maximizing the number of clicks, opens and conversions is the primary method that ROI is measured for most marketers. However, maximizing all of these response metrics requires that your email is delivered to your subscribers’ inbox by the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This metric is commonly referred to as deliverability or inbox placement rate.

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50 Per Cent More Marketing Emails Considered Spam By ISPs

Marketers’ continued poor practices result in their emails being increasingly blocked and consigned to spam folders Email marketers’ lack of best practice forced a near 50 per cent jump in emails not being delivered to the inboxes of UK customers …

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Mailbox Providers Suggest Collaboration with Senders

In a panel presentation here at Mediapost’s Email Insider Summit, Yahoo! and Hotmail struck a very cooperative and collaborative tone for working with marketers and other senders as the two major global mailbox providers aim to expand their inbox products and spam filtering.

Carlo Catajan, Product Manager for Yahoo! Mail and Daniel Lewis, Sr. Product Manager for Microsoft Windows LIVE Hotmail both said …

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Domain Reputation: Hope or Hype?

Fred Tabsharani has a thought-provoking article on Deliverability.com about domain reputation.

I have a few thoughts on the “gold rush” Fred describes, based on my conversations with major ISPs and others in the industry:

1) The industry is making WAY too much out of domain reputation

The manic nature of a “Gold Rush” is exactly what the raft of articles about domain reputation feels like. It feels like a lot of marketers are saying the equivalent of “Now that domain reputation is in place, all my delivery problems will disappear.” Sure, domain reputation has some advantages such as reputation portability (as Fred points out). However, there are two things to note …

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Prioritization of Spam at Gmail

UPDATE: The original version of this post had a link to the main Google YouTube channel, which had featured the spam video. After we published this, they swapped in a new video, causing confusion for some readers. We’ve now updated the link to go directly to the video about Gmail spam priorization. Sorry for any confusion we caused.

Google’s Gmail can be somewhat of a mystery. They do things a bit differently than other large ISPs and they do it well. From our perspective in deliverability, Gmail is always a tougher ISP to understand and troubleshoot.

Most of the experts know that Gmail relies heavily on their user feedback and “this is spam” vs. “this is not spam” voting, but many questions remained around how they really prioritize complaints. Recently, they posted a video to YouTube that helps us understand just a little more and pull back a bit more of the mystery.

Google’s Matt Cutts says Google does order complaints, and that typically, they try to think about what the impact is on the user. So, if they get …

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How Deliverability is Like SEO and SEM for Email

I admit this is an imperfect analogy, and I’m sure many of my colleagues in the email industry are going to blanch at a comparison to search, but the reality is that email deliverability is still not well understood — and search engines are. I hope that I can make a comparison here that will help you better understand what it really means to work on deliverability – they same way you understand what it means to work on search.

But before we get to that, let’s start with the language around deliverability which is still muddled. I’d like to encourage everyone in the email industry to rally around more precise meanings. Specifically I’d like propose that we start to use the term “inbox placement rate” or IPR, for short. I think this better explains what marketers mean when they say “delivered” – because anywhere other than the inbox is not going to generate the kind of response that marketers need. The problem with the term “delivered” is that it is usually used to mean “didn’t bounce.” While that is a good metric to track, it does not tell you where the email lands. Inbox placement rate, by contrast, is pretty straightforward: how much of the email you sent landed in the inbox of our customers and prospects?

Now let’s come back to how achieving a high inbox placement rate is like search. If you run a web site, you certainly understand …

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Mail.com Hosted by AOL

After some investigating, our sources confirm that now AOL (rather than Outblaze) is MXing the mail.com domain and many vanity domains operated by mail.com (accountant.com, bikerider.com, europe.com, etc. – see full list on mail.com website — click on the “view all addresses” link in the top bar).

MXing the mail refers to how the email is being routed. Currently the mail passes through the server at AOL and then back to Outblaze. The mailboxes are not yet hosted at AOL but it seems they will be soon, and then they will be routed only to AOL.

For senders to mail.com and other domains that were once hosted by Outblaze this now means …

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More Spam? Say it ain't so!

A recent flurry of articles on the increase of spam, have focused on the likelihood that we will continue to see a rise in the percentage of spam in overall email volumes:

• All Spammed Up reported “that spam has increased over 141% since March and also found that spam volumes grow by over 117 billion e-mails a day”
• McAfee has reported that in a little less than five months there has been a 140% increase in total spam volume. Reported causes are the 16% rise in botnet infections from Q1 2009 to Q2 2009. Many are also pointing a finger at the exploitation of social-networking sites for sending spam.
• MX Logic recently released their July 2009 Threat Forecast report claiming that “Spam as a percentage of overall mail has reached its highest point ever, currently accounting for 94.6 percent of all e-mail”

It looks as though this is a trend we will continue to see reported by security vendors.

So, what does this really mean for the email universe …

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