Best of the ESPs by Forrester Research. Congrats to ET and Responsys for coming out on top. The results, as reported by MediaPost, match reasonably well with my overall impressions of the industry (so they must be right!)

Return Path is rolling out a new version of SenderScore. A welcome change for those of us who regularly refer to an IP’s sender score and find it doesn’t match other data.

CAUCE has done a series of posts looking back at significant events in spam over the last decade.

Al has a retrospective on various data breaches affecting email addresses over the last few years.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Blocked email: why me? on Cloudmark’s blog. A good introduction to blocking issues.

Tamara’s links for 4/16. She’s found a lot of good posts here, including multiple posts about unsubscribes and others on improving your email marketing program.

Speaking of unsubscribes, Loren McDonald discusses how the location of the unsubscribe link can affect reputation and email performance.

Denise Cox posts about a recent conference she attended in London looking at what makes email valuable. She has many good suggestions on how to improve your ROI, but captures the essence of getting a good ROI on mail in 3 sentences.

The points made during this event drove home the fact that it has to be an email newsletter of value to the recipient. While email marketing has a zillion benefits for marketers – in the end all efforts and time spent are about delivering value to the recipient. This is the only way marketers will see ROI in their email marketing.

On that theme, I had a discussion with someone handling abuse@ a very large ISPs. He was commenting on the request from a member of sales to mark a specific customer “not a spam problem.” After looking at the complaint rates, abuse@ said there was no way they were not a spam problem. He pointed out to sales that the problem is not that the ISP is seeing the mail as spam, but that the recipients are seeing the mail as spam. Yet another reminder that if senders want to change the perception of mail the place to change it is directly with recipients. When senders send mail that is valuable to the recipients spam problems fade away, whether those problems be blocked emails or mail from their ISP.

The EEC has published 2 email checklists to help you design your emails correctly. They are free this week, so go download them. (I tried to access with Safari and was stuck in broken form hell. Their form does work with Firefox, though.