AOL Announces new Support Tools

Today on the AOL Postmaster Blog they announced a new set of "Web Support Tools" these are currently in Beta, so don't expect everything to be perfect while using them, but I expect few issues as these are well tested before getting to Beta.

From AOL:

The AOL Postmaster Team is pleased to announce the beta of our new web support tool for delivery issues. Please feel free to test it out and give us your thoughts and feedback. We hope it will provide a way for mailers to get help and resolution more quickly than ever before!

It must be stressed, though, that this is just a beta, and problems could arise.

Give these tools a try and post some feed back to AOL or leave me a comment and I'll pass them along to the right people @ AOL.

The tools look like they are split into the three most common support requests made to AOL (at least from my experience):

* FBL Modification/Deletion Request Tool -- FeedBack Loop tools
* RTR/RLY/DNS Block Removal Request Tool -- General Configuration Type issues
* HVU Inquiry/Removal Tool -- Spam Blocking issues

For a full list of errors returned during email delivery by AOL, check out their "Error Messages" list.

Yahoo! announces Yahoo.in

Received word today from Yahoo!'s Postmaster team that a new localized domain, for India, will be coming online.

New mail users in India will now be designated with an @yahoo.in email address. Users who have mail accounts with Yahoo! India prior to this transition will continue to use their accounts ending in @yahoo.co.in.

This coming shortly after the announcement for Ymail and Rocketmail. As with all Yahoo domains this should continue to be managed by the mail team located in California and under the same anti-spam, rate limits and white listing services.

Still no updates from Yahoo on the pending changes to their Feedback loops - new applications are still on hold.

Changes at Excite, Iwon and MyWay

Today I receive a notice from the email administrator from Excite.com... Below is a summary of this update:

We are in the process of outsourcing our webmail to a company by the name of BlueTie. I don’t know how many of you have heard of them, so I have included the following links:

• http://bluetie.com/aboutus/index.php
• http://bluetie.com/aboutus/pressroom/pr2008-04-16-01.php
  

BlueTie will host our mail servers and the web pages. They will not handle our abuse or customer service. This will be maintained by us. They will be handling our spam filtering and white/black list. I do know, however, they do not have a feedback loop program. I have recommended that they do so and that it be in ARF format.

Therefore, as of the cut-over date, anyone who currently is whitelisted with us will no longer have this benefit. In addition, all feedback loops will cease. We expect email to start moving over within the next few days and it will take about a month to move everything.

What is the impact of this?

1. The current whitelisting and Feedback loops managed by Excite will cease to function over the next few weeks.
2. Monitoring delivery to the Excite, Iwon and MyWay domains will be critical to understand; rate limits, bounces and system delivery requirements.
3. Delivery issues should be addresses to BlueTie, while spam and abuse issues (only when your receiving email not sending it) should continue to goto excite.com to handel.
   

I will continue to post updates and progressing notes as I recieve them.

Yahoo! Announces Global Availability of Two New E-mail Domains

World's largest e-mail service gives people the chance to get the e-mail address they've always wanted with the launch of ymail.com and rocketmail.com

Sunnyvale, Calif. – June 19, 2008 – Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) today announced the global availability of two new e-mail domains that will give users the chance to register for the e-mail address or Yahoo! ID they have always wanted. People can finally say goodbye to CutiePie4Ever80 or mattclark1977@yahoo.com and get a new Yahoo! e-mail address at ymail.com and rocketmail.com.

Yahoo! Mail is the number one Web mail service in the world with more than 260 million users worldwide¹. As a result of its global popularity, many desirable e-mail addresses have already been taken for the yahoo.com domain, as well as for localized versions of the namespace in countries around the world. With the two new e-mail domain choices, Yahoo! will make millions of new e-mail addresses available to the online community.

Yahoo! recently commissioned a survey conducted by Harris Interactive^® to determine what online adults look for when choosing an e-mail address and found some noteworthy results:

• The majority of online adults (59 percent) consider the most important attribute of an e-mail address to be that it is easy to remember.

• When asked if they could choose any e-mail address for personal use, seven in ten online adults (70 percent) would opt to have some portion of their name included – 31 percent would want their last name included, 27 percent would choose their first name, while 28 percent would prefer to have their nickname as part of their e-mail address.

• Of online adults who indicated that they are not currently using their first choice e-mail address, over half (54 percent) agree that they want their e-mail address to reflect who they are, and about half (48 percent) would be at least somewhat likely to change addresses should their preferred choice become available.

"We recognize that people want an e-mail address that reflects who they are,whether they are signing up for an e-mail address for the first time, or simply updating their e-mail pseudonym to reflect the stage they are at in life," said John Kremer, vice president, Yahoo! Mail."We are thrilled to be able to offer new Yahoo! e-mail domain choices to Internet users, along with the same great Web mail experience that hundreds of millions of people have already come to expect."

E-mail addresses at the new domains will have the same great Yahoo! Mail features as addresses at the yahoo.com domain, including:

• Unlimited storage – Yahoo! Mail provides all users with free unlimited e-mail storage²

• Integrated Instant Messaging and Text Messaging – Users can connect in real-time to their contacts with Yahoo! Messenger or Windows Live® Messenger and send text messages to friends on the go, right from their Yahoo! Mail inbox

• Protection from spam and viruses – All of the same great protection that is built into Yahoo! Mail will apply to these new domains. Yahoo! uses advanced technologies and data from numerous sources to dramatically reduce the delivery of spam and phishing e-mails

• Country-specific e-mail account – When signing up for an e-mail account, users have the option of choosing localized country versions from each of the Yahoo! domains: yahoo.com, ymail.com and rocketmail.com

As always, a Yahoo! ID will work for everything across the Yahoo! Network, from checking e-mail to checking out Messenger, Flickr, Groups, Sports, Finance and more.

In many markets, Yahoo! will also help users transfer their e-mail and contacts to their new address and notify friends of their new e-mail address.

In addition, Yahoo! has reserved a number of desirable e-mail addresses – all related to charitable organizations – using the new domains and will put these e-mail addresses up for charity auction beginning on Thursday, June 19, 2008. Yahoo! is working with auction partners eBay Giving Works and Auction Cause. The proceeds from the auction will benefit the following organizations: The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Ocean Conservancy, Point Foundation, Right To Playand World Wildlife Fund. To participate in the online auction, please visit http://www.ebay.com/ymail.

Users can learn more about and register for a new e-mail at ymail.com and rocketmail.com at http://mail.yahoo.com.

About Yahoo! Mail

Launched in October1997, Yahoo! Mail is the world's largest, most popular free e-mail service. Yahoo! Mail helps people stay in touch at home, at work, or while traveling for business or pleasure, and is available in 22 languages. Yahoo! Mail is fully integrated with Yahoo!'s many other popular services to make it easy to access all the Internet services people need. Yahoo! Mail has recently received the Best of Web award from PC World, and was awarded Editors' Choice by both PC Magazine and CNET.

About Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one ofthe most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! is focused on powering its communities of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers by creating indispensable experiences built on trust. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit pressroom.yahoo.com or the company's blog,Yodel Anecdotal.

About the Survey

This Yahoo! study was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive between June 2and June 4, 2008 among 2,035 adults ages 18+. The data have been weighted to reflect the composition of the online U.S. adult population on the basisof Internet usage (hours per week) and connection type. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.

Yahoo! and Yodel Anecdotal are the trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Yahoo! Inc.

© 2008 Yahoo! Inc., All rights reserved.

1) According to comScore MediaMetrix, April 2008

2) More information about unlimited storage in e-mail can be found here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/tools/tools-08.html

Contact:

Kelley Podboy, Yahoo! Inc.: 408-349-3149, podboyk@yahoo-inc.com

Liz Clinkenbeard, OutCast Communications: 415-345-4715, liz@outcastpr.com

Yahoo Ticketing systems update

Received notice today that Yahoo's postmaster teams ticket queues have begun to clear and that the average response time, that has been experience over the last couple months (2 weeks), has returned to the normal 24 to 48 hours.

Remember - Provide as many of the details up front when opening a ticket with Yahoo's (or any ISP's) Postmaster team... This will help reduce resolution times and will accelerate the postmaster support teams investigations and applications, without needing to ask additional questions about your issues.

NOTE: This does not effect Feedback loop applications, they are still on hold at this time.

Q&A | Is SPF2.0 Dead?

Q:
I've spoken with several folks and am still confused about whether or not SenderID is actually needed when sending to MSN/Hotmail.

What's the verdict? Is SenderID dead? Do spfv2 records need to be published? Is it sufficient to just publish SPF (v1) records when sending to MSN/Hotmail?

Sincerely confused on this one...

A:
I was intrigued by this question, as it was not something I had ever been told while working with the support teams at Hotmail, so I sent a note off to my contacts within Microsoft and got back the official word;

"In the majority of cases, using the SPF record will satisfy both SPF as well as SenderID verification within the Hotmail systems. Organizations that wish to publish a SenderID record are encouraged to do so. This second record will be used for SenderID validations, of the PRA domain only, and will take precedence over the classic SPF record."

Conclusions:

• SenderID is not dead - in fact it's still the one method used by Hotmail's authentication services.
• SPF (v1) implementations will continue to validate the MAIL FROM domain unless the sender has published a spf2.0/pra record.
• Publishing both records is not going to hurt your delivery to Hotmail.
• SPF is still being checked in the absence of SenderID - SPF is supported ongoing because most senders don't have just a 2.0 record yet.
• While only one records is sufficient, my recommendation continues to be publish both, as some other ISPs continue to pick one over the other.

MSFT Live Mail | We ARE Listening

More and more ISPs are getting in on blogging as a way to comunicate with customers, end users and other members of the email comunity. Reciently the Windows Live Hotmail Technical Support team released these two postings about updates to their mail platforms:

Microsoft Announces Changes for Accessing Hotmail with Outlook Express - announcing changed to the Outlook client and how it will interact with Hotmail.

and

We ARE Listening - Comments and posinting are being reviewed and passed back to the Product team. Get your comments ready!

ISP Update | Comcast FBL out of beta

Received word today that the Comcast Feed Back loop is now out of BETA testing and is ready for a larger audience to participate.

Details: The Comcast Feedback Loop which is managed by ReturnPath has officially come out of beta. If you have already signed up for this service as part of their beta group there is nothing you need to do as your "subscription" will continue as normal.

What you will need to apply:

• Your Contact Information (first/last name, Email and Company)
• Feedback Loop Information (i.e. your mailing domain with a functional abuse@ or postmaster@ email address)
• A Feedback Loop Email - This is where Feedback Loop emails will go.
• A list of your IP Addresses: List the IP addresses (one per line) or you may also enter CIDR ranges of /24 or higher.

Please be patient as the expected number of applicants may be significant and the resources for application review may be a bit stretched to get thought the initial push, you will have to give them a bit of a break as they will get to your application as soon as they can.

To apply for this service.

Project Gmail Grimace: The Gmail Appeal video

The Email Standards Project has moved into the next phase of "Project Gmail Grimace". A Project aimed at getting the attention of Gmail's Developmet staff by having email designers send in photos of themselves feeling the pain of designing email that is properly rendered in the Gmail interface.

This week the Email Standard Project launches the first Gmail Appeal video.

Here is a description of Project Gmail Grimace:

The 2008 Gmail Appeal
Here at the Email Standards Project, we've heard from designers all over the world how frustrating it is that Gmail, the otherwise excellent webmail client, does such a disappointing job rendering HTML email.

The results of the Gmail Acid Test, a control message sent to all of the tested webmail clients, can be found here. Don't forget to share your Gmail Story.

Is Yahoo Mail still broken?

Recently Marketing Sherpa posted an article about ongoing issues with Yahoo! mail delivery and I left the following comment:

Many of the Yahoo issues have been resolved and its been said that any remaining issues are likely the result of filter adjustments and fringe cases where reputation was already near the edge of rate limiting, or filtering. Using the postmaster help pages is the recommended course of action for senders that continue to experience issues. Yahoo has been very open with their communications to ESPs, posting their the Y! mail blogs and the updated Postmaster pages... ...The real key to uninterrupted email delivery is to have a clean, consent based, highly relevant mail stream.

Working everyday with a number of very large email clients being on top of best practices, delivery requirements and changes to ISP policies is critical. If your still experiencing issues likely there are too many; bounces, complaints or your still sending mail is a manor that Y! doesn't like - too fast, too many users per connection/message, too many spam traps or dead addresses (hard bounces) being mailed to over and over.

Also Y!'s mail blog mentioned today that they are still behind in dealing tickets and that they are still working to address the issue.

A comment left for Yahoo related to these two articles echo's the same thing that I'm saying here - "I’m not experiencing Yahoo problems myself. This recent campaign sent to my list had no Yahoo issues whatsoever".

ISP blog roundup

AOL discusses Invalid Recipients and what you should look out for to avoid trouble. This may be related to an earlier posting by Word to the Wise regarding some information AOL was looking to collect from senders.

Yahoo discusses some of the security features of the new Preview pain, including why they use Image blocking and some notes on Spoofing and Script protection, in this post Answering concerns about Preview Pane.

Gmail Releases some new features for Google App users and some fresh tips onimporting old email to Gmail.

Microsoft has some tips for a blank email issue that some of their users were experiencing, and anti-spam engineer Terry Zink discusses Safe Senders features in Microsoft's products.

AOL Postmaster Team Starts Blogging

Find it here: http://journals.aol.com/pmtjournal/blog

Quote: "We are here for one reason only — to keep you informed about what's going on with the AOL Anti-Spam Team and how it might affect you."

You can add this to the list of other ISP blogs posted here: New Blogs to read

My take on the spam button report...

Recently there was a report released (DMNews) about the use and understanding of the "Report spam" button by consumers and that they actually report legitimate email as spam.

This is not really a surprise, experience shows that users will use the button for the following reasons:

• As an unsubscribe - ISPs are looking at ways to manage this - Hotmail was the first to implement an Unsubscribe button for "Known senders".
• By mistake - Users are potentially reporting a number of unsolicited email at the same time and if your message/brand is not clear you might get included in the mass report. Even personal email communications get reported as spam.
• To tell you "It's just not relevant" - spam has evolved from pills, porn and gambling to stuff I (the consumer) just don't want.

Mark has a great write up summarizing a few of the other articles written about this report.

Watch the trends in your Feedback Loops to identify potential issues in your email program, group these individuals by collection source (especially if your using multiple collection locations), Types of messages being sent and the demographics of your members to focus and improve your messaging so that it becomes relevant to your subscribers.

If your not watching - be warned - the ISPs and your ESP are all watching and you might just find your self in hot water with one or both of them.

New Blogs to read

Today I found some new information sources to read courtesy of our friends over at Microsoft:

Windows Live Hotmail Technical Support Blog - The official technical support blog for Windows Live Hotmail and the Live Mail Client.
Your mail is here, come and get it! -
Web mail musings from the Windows Live Hotmail team
Windows Live Mail
It's for more than just email

I'm sure there are some hidden treasures in these... Once I have more time to digest the contents I'll share what I find.

Also don't forget to add these to the list of necessary reads:

Official Gmail Blog
Yahoo! Mail Blog

Do you have any other ISP blogs to share, Leave us a a comment or email us at contact.

Following the rules

I get asked a lot about the different rules at each ISP, and how to find more information on these policies. Here is a short list of the most common domains I get asked about;

• AOL - http://postmaster.info.aol.com/
• Gmail - http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html
• Hotmail/MSN - http://postmaster.msn.com/
• OutBlaze - http://spamblock.outblaze.com/
• Yahoo - http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/

These pages contain many helpful resources that will help you understand the policies, practices, common questions and tools available from each ISP.

Have others to list, or need to know about a specific ISP - let us know or leave a comment.

Y! puts FBL additions and updates on hold

For those of you participating in the Yahoo Feedback Loop program, be aware that any new IPs or modifications to your existing program are currently on hold.

Yahoo! reciently updated their Postmaster pages and posted the following notice:

Due to the success of our beta program, we are currently making changes to the application process for the Yahoo! Mail Complaint Feedback Loop program. As such, we are *not* processing new applications at this time. We do hope to re-launch an improved, more streamlined online process for interested participants soon.

This appears to be part of the ongoing changes and process updates that Yahoo is undergoing, that were discussed in a recent post; Yahoo! Reaches out to Senders. Hopefully these changes will be made quickly and the application/update process will return to normal, keep an eye out for updates on this and other ISP related news.

Yahoo! Reaches out to Senders

On Yahoo's Mail blog you will find a notice for bulk senders, ISPs, and commercial emailers, describing the delays and steps that need to be reviewed when reaching out to the Postmaster team in order to help with issues your experiencing.

Key items from this posting:

• The Correct form is accessible from the Postmaster section in Yahoo! Mail Help (http://postmaster.yahoo.com) site.
• Follow-up inquiries from senders delay things even more as they create additional queue items.
• Be careful when you fill out the form, double check for completeness and accurately. This prevents a lengthy back and forth dialog that delays your progress.

Read the full article: Delays responding to Postmaster requests

Q&A | Follow up to comment on Y!

As I was writing a reply to the comment made by DJ on yesterday's post I realized I had a whole posts worth of stuff to say so I moved the reply to here. DJ asked three key questions:

What are you thoughts on Yahoo! in general?

I love Y! I have been using the same account at @yahoo.com for personal email for the last 10 (maybe more) years and with the latest spam filtering changes my daily spam load inbound has dropped to a handful each day (I might even go as low as a dozen a week). It's great to see an ISP, the size of Y!, participate and interact with groups like the Email Standards Project to ensure that they are able to render the messages being sent into there users, if only others would participate and listen with this same interest.

Do you see this as a potential issue going forward? An anomaly?

Most ISPs go through times like these, where Technology is being updated/tweaked or all together replaced. Yahoo is a big company with a huge network, small mistakes or changes can have a much larger then expected effect on the general public with network like this.

Do you envision Yahoo! having deliverability issues on and off in the future?

Just like any feature role out there can be issues, I wouldn't harp on Y! to much about this one as they worked quickly to fix the issue. When dealing with (potentially) thousands of mail servers no matter how fast you work to fix something its going to take time. Time to investigate, time to find a solution and time to implement that solution.

Yahoo Delivery News

Recently there have been several discussions surrounding delivery issues with Yahoo's mail servers. Laura discusses these in three parts over at Word to the Wise; Part 1, 2 and 3.

The cause for these errors seems to have be some new and tighter spam filtering policies recently put in place for inbound mail messages. Like other ISPs Yahoo's systems are continually monitored and tweaked for performance. After receiving several notices from mailers Yahoo's team worked to diagnose and resolve this issue, returning delivery rates to normal - for most mailers. For those of your still having problems, you should contact Yahoo through their postmaster forms at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/

In other Yahoo news; the Email Standards Project has announced some changes in the Yahoo mail client which bring both of the Y! webmail clients into full compliance with their Acid Test. Original Test results.

BUZZ | Hey Gmail!!!

The Group over at the Email Standards Project (ESP) is looking for help getting the Gmail developers attention and they are asking for your help.

Here is a quote from Mathew Patterson over at the ESP:

The idea is simple - play off the well known Gmail collaborative video with
our own video. Theirs was people passing the Gmail 'M' from frame to frame.

They are asking for your images - expressing pain at the rendering issues experienced in the web client - to be posted to a Flickr group dubbed Project Grimace.

These guys have pushed the envelope in the hopes of achieving email rendering standardization globally, already getting the attention of both Yahoo and IBM.