Comments on: 20% of email doesn’t make it to the inbox

By: John Johnson

John Johnson — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:47:28 +0000

RE: Yahoo TS-01 messages

This *does not* necessarily indicate that Yahoo has deemed the sending IP to have reputation problems. If you are experiencing TS-01 temp delays do examine your retry policy. That is the best advice I can give – based on a call with several ESPs and Yahoo Postmasters some months back.

Regards,
John Johnson

By: Byron

Byron — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:07:13 +0000

Re. the comment about a purchase confirmation message from Amazon… Has anyone else noticed that these (Paypal as well) are plain-text messages? Does anyone have any evidence that plain-text messages will see better deliverability than HTML? It seems logical that they would but I don’t have any hard evidence.

By: Timeliness of email – Word to the Wise

Timeliness of email – Word to the Wise — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:59:38 +0000

[...] been an interesting discussion in the comments from yesterday’s post about temp failing. My position is that email is not a 100% reliable medium for transmitting time sensitive [...]

By: laura

laura — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:57:19 +0000

In general the real problem comes in when you are dealing with something like a 1 day sale, or some other type of limited time offer.

I would argue email is the wrong way to advertise these types of sales. I know a lot of companies do it (the number of emails I get from a particular clothing retailer advertising their “weekend blowout” or “one day sale” is excessive. I also don’t bother to check their website most of the time because I know that come next weekend there will be another one. Because there is always another one.

The less snarky answer is that: you don’t send mail at 9 am advertising a 24 hour sale ending at 9am the next morning. You send mail on Tuesday advertising a 24 hour sale from Thursday 8 am to Friday 8 am. Give yourself a little time and give your recipient a heads up. You can then send a reminder “sale ends 8am Friday” late Wednesday or early Thursday.

Expecting instantaneous delivery is the problem here. And, yes, recipient expectations are part of the problem, too. But, the ISPs are pretty good at prioritizing email that recipients want like purchase notifications and plane tickets and hotel reservations. And, senders are the marketers, aren’t they the ones who are supposed to be good at modeling what consumers want?

By: John Karnes

John Karnes — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:46:18 +0000

I certainly agree on the timing – How many clients show up and say something like “I have a list of x million customers and I need to send to the entire list in 1 hour”. The flip side of course is that when you buy something at Amazon, or buy a plane ticket, you don’t expect more than a few minutes (at most) to go by before your confirmation is in your inbox, and that’s not the sender’s expectations

In general the real problem comes in when you are dealing with something like a 1 day sale, or some other type of limited time offer. A recipient is mad at the sender when they get the email the day after the sale or offer ended, but if the sale notification goes to a mailbox they didn’t check and they just didn’t see it in time, that set’s a completely different attitude towards the sender.

I think the unrealistic expectations tend to be more on the recipient side (hey, me included), and the desires of the senders to meet those expectations are simply reflected. The average email recipient wants the stuff they want ASAP, they don’t care about rate limiting, temp fails, the size of your list, etc. The real question is how do legitimate senders do that?

Good discussion!

By: laura

laura — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:45:38 +0000

I think some of the problem here actually has to do with sender expectations. Email, as a protocol, is not designed to be instantaneous. Practically, there is no way to guarantee that the email you send now gets in front of your recipient immediately. If nothing else, there is no guarantee that the recipient will be sitting in their chair reading mail at that very moment. Just because you send it, does not mean that the recipient will get it when you want them to. The recipient may be on vacation, or may be not checking email for other reasons, or may only check that email account once a week.

In any case, expecting email to be an instantaneous form of communication is a misunderstanding of how email works and unrealistic expectations of what email can do for you.

http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2009/03/email-is-store-and-forward/

By: laura

laura — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:40:47 +0000

Once a sender has gotten to the point of a [TS01] message at Yahoo, it generally means that Yahoo has identified that the mail is not wanted by Yahoo customers. Instead of changing sending rates and retry schedules, I’d suggest you look at the underlying issue. What is the sender doing that is causing user complaints? Is it an issue with permission? Is the mail expected? How can my customer change their process to fix the lack of engagement with customers? Is this a customer that would benefit from certification?

By: laura

laura — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:35:23 +0000

Hi, Matt. You are correct, the tone of the discussion I was commenting on was not set by Return Path, it’s what I’m seeing and hearing elsewhere in the industry.

By: Chris Nagele

Chris Nagele — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:53:40 +0000

I think this depends on a company’s definition of an acceptable delay. For some people a delay of 24 hours might be fine, but others it could be considered a lost opportunity. A good example is an event reminder or announcement. In this case it is as good as a hard bounce.

PowertMTA has some really nice methods for handling the temp issues, like backing off connections and setting retry periods. From what is says on Yahoo’s site, they recommend trying again after four hours.

In some cases it seems like Yahoo creates delays for handling their own resource load, no matter what the sender practices are. I’d be interested to hear feedback from others on this. Yahoo is definitely an ISP that requires a lot of tweaking on the MTA.

By: John Karnes

John Karnes — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:59:01 +0000

Laura, I am a little curious about the Yahoo! Strategy. We will sometimes see one of our IP addresses start receiving a steady stream of 4xx errors, usually:

421 4.7.0 [TS01] Messages from X.X.X.X temporarily deferred due to user complaints – 4.16.55.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html

In our experience, this seems to be pretty much as good as a permanent failure. We only keep emails in our queues and retry messages for 72 hours on temp fails, and we do that on a 20min, 40, 80, 160, etc. Schedule. Again, once we start seeing these errors with Yahoo, they don’t seem to stop inside that window and as a result, all the messages perm fail with a timeout after 72 hours. We’ve tried slowing down our outbound rate and different retry schedules, but not with much success. Has anyone out there observed approximately how long it takes for yahoo to start accepting again once you’ve seen one of these messages?

For our clients that run into this issue, it is making it hard for us to work with them to better manage their lists and reputations. One of our clients that hit this issue just yesterday is a utility company sending notifications to their customers – not even a marketing message…