I’m aware of Outblaze (you and I hashed this out on the Forum). The outcome is they require ESPs like us to enforce a double-opt-in policy. There is nothing that we can do about that, outside of recommending that you employ that. Luckily, not many domains utilize Outblaze, so it’s not a major concern for clients. It is a concern on the mind of our Email Systems Team, nonetheless. We’ve made numerous attempts to contact Outblaze and they refused to discuss this with us. It’s my understanding that Outblaze blocked our entire Class-C subnet — which includes our premium IPs.

I recommend using powerful email copy to encourage the user to confirm their e-mail so they “continue to receive free reports, updates and special offers” from you (as an example). I’m sure you’re employing the best practices, but it’s prudent to test, tweak and adapt to whatever generates more conversions. The formula for email marketing success always changes.

Your request to keep our servers clean is being done, every day. Our Email Compliance Team audits the top offenders and terminates service, in addition, we monitor our server blocks and address them with ISP administrators. Email server “cleanliness” is a mutual effort from customers and ourselves alike. Some clients ask us why their messages go to the spam folder on their recipients. Well, look at the quality and the content of the e-mails: mortgage refinance offers, pill pushing, MLM offers, etc. That’s what the ISPs look at and reject. It’s the bottom 1% of clients who send this stuff and it causes us a great deal of pain to address it.

We are committed to offering service to people who follow up with their customers. E-mail is only only aspect of it. Infusionsoft offers other pieces of the puzzle that traditional email marketing providers miss — ecommerce functionality, affiliate program management, marketing automation software, advanced contact management, and sales force automation. E-mail is only a fragment of that, ableit an important one, clients should leverage multiple streams of follow-up with customers and not depend solely on e-mail.

This maybe a bit long for a “Blog Posting” but here it goes… as it is a very important topic that requires “Open Communications”… and Infusionsoft can help in this regard.

Trying to get a clear cut response from ISP’s, Hosting Companies related to their protocol is near impossible. Over the past year. I have had my email addresses hijacked, my domain names used to send out mass mailings, and a hosting company I was using hijacked and their data used and abused…. All with out my knowledge…. and all not with out consequences.

For the last 6 months I have had difficulty sending personal emails… using my ISP, using my hosting company. The only outgoing server SMTP that seems to be immune to any sending problems is my google account.

I have spent countless hours over the last several months trying to determine the cause…

I have gained some very interesting insight into this matter. The long and short of it is that “Email Marketing”, is no longer a reliable means for doing business!

Let me repeat that….. “Email Marketing”, is no longer a reliable means for doing business!

Saying that, I still believe that it is the MOST EFFECTIVE, means for business communications.

The pendulum of change swings both ways…… it has now swung too far in one direction, and it needs to have some corrections to insure that this form of “Marketing” can continue to be effective and viable.

For effective change to take place, there needs to be “Open two way communications” between the groups that what this type of marketing to be cleaned up…

Right now…. Anyone that uses emails as a means of Market Communication leaves themselves open to being “Guilty of Spamming”, and without any real recourse for defense. ISP & Hosting companies, only really care about insuring that their servers stay up and running. Service, complaints, emails are only an irritation for them…

Emails, were never initially intended to be used for commerce…

And this service…. Has been abused, exploited and overused.

I have switched to Infusionsoft for many reasons… but one of the primary reasons is to work with them and improve this “Vital” form of email marketing.

I have been diligently working to “Clean” my lists… and I firmly believe that “Double Opt-in” list is one of the ways to help insure our lists are clean…

I am an affiliate for quite a few large and respected companies, I have communicated with these “Gurus”… and their percentage of true “Double Opt-in” is actually quite low.

Included in every email I send out, is a request for “Double Opt-in”, and these links are being clicked… but ever so slowly…

This is OUR only real means of defense as ‘Marketers”.

To do this we do, need to have a working, open relationship with our service providers.

I for one am very willing to raise my hand and be part of a group to help in this regard….

My listings are based on people primarily in businesses, needing certain time of information and products, and people wanting to be in business. The later is going to expand as this economy continues to try and recover.

Email Marketing must be functioning and viable for this economy to turn around.

I welcome any and all feed back…. Let me know how I can help…

Kevin Barrett

We hear you loud and clear regarding the types of reports that we should offer. Expect some enhancements to be made around email reporting. Its a big opportunity for us to attack this year and without passionate users, it’s not possible. You’ve probably heard me say it before, but please head over to the http://ideas.infusionsoft.com/ and submit, vote, and comment on new product ideas. We just tackled about 15 ideas in the past quarter. (These ideas are those suggested by customers, that never intended on doing!)

For Spam Complaints, we intend that to include ISP complaints (AOL, MSN, Yahoo, SpamCop, etc.) AND Internal Feedback Complaints (‘Is this SPAM?’ on Opt-Out pages). Bounces due to bad address don’t count … however, just understand that some really old email addresses could penalize us. A secret in the mail industry is to silently listen for commercial mail on old/retired email accounts. Those are known as Spam Traps.

Yes, 0.1% is based on REAL spam complaints. It’s okay if it fluctuates, as it will; but if one goes to 0.4% they had better be operating at 0.05% most of the time. Perhaps highlighting “best cases” of our users would help illuminate the better practices through application? I’ve been thinking about that, but have been on the fence about it.

Thanks for your feedback, Sean. We appreciate your strong interest in making our software the number one marketing automation software on the Web; and we’re getting there together!

~Joe

1. Feedback due to “bounce”. This seems to be reporting that an email was mis-entered by the user, or perhaps the users email server isn’t responding. Doesn’t seem like these should be included in “complaints”. Can you please clarify what this feedback actually means? Will be hard to hit .1% if you include bounces.

2. A lot of items labeled as SPAM in the Email Status Search report, actually seem to be feedback, with entries like “I no longer want email”, or “emails too frequent”. While this is really useful information to help us focus on giving people what they want, when they want it, it doesn’t seem that it should count against the .1%. A number of these had originally double opted-in, so they clearly requested the information, and it obviously wasn’t unsolicited. Please label feedback as feedback, not SPAM.

Can you please further clarify that the .1% is based on real SPAM complaints and not bounces or feedback as presently included in your complaint report.

Thanks for the new tools for diving into this. We see a couple of improvements we can make. Also glad to see Infusion has revised its policy, and look forward to seeing it updated in your official AUP.