Deirdre Baird,President & CEO of Pivotal Veracity made this post yesterday that I wanted to share. For eveyone that ever wondered about AOL and their inbox process...here is a great overview. www.pivotalveracity.com
Inbox Delivery
- AOL has some of the best filtering around to include the ability to distinguish both legitimate and spam mail and place it accordingly. Across our clients INBOX delivery is 91.7% over the last 60 days. This includes both whitelisted and non-whitelisted mailers, and both acquisition and retention mailings (albeit primarily the latter). The percent in the Spam folder during the same period was a mere 0.1%. When AOL thinks you're a spammer, they first feed you temperrors (soft bounces intended to tax your system), followed by outright blocking. Most our retention-based AOL whitelisted mailers routinely get 98%-100% inbox delivery.
- A tiny tiny fraction of mailers qualified for the Enhanced Whitelist and since its not going away (although the spam complaint threshold is going to 0.1%) its still an option.
- Most whitelisted mailers emails - whether on the EWL or Standard Whitelist do go into the inbox. The Standard Whitelist is still extremely important as it allows you to avoid AOL's volume filters which begin when mail exceeds 100/emails per day.
-- Bottom line... a mailers EXISTING inbox Delivery at AOL is NOT going to get worse just because Goodmail Certified Email is around and for legitimate mailers using top-notch ESPs, their delivery is already darn good.
Image Rendering
- AOL has had the same exact treatment of images and links for the last 3 years. In 2002, AOL 8.0 was introduced. AOL 8.0, AOL 9.0 and AOL.com all have images and links OFF by default. This is not changing. The default has been off for years and will remain off.
- There are still 3 NO-cost ways to change the default to ON at AOL. 1) Your address is in the customers address book, 2) you're on the enhanced whitelist, and 3) your customer uses AOL anywhere to imap their message into a desktop client like Outlook 2002 where images are on (and AOL's treatment is not applicable).
- ISPs/Email Clients like GMAIL, MSN (software), Outlook 2003, Thunderbird, etc. all have images OFF as well and there is nothing you can do about it. This is not to imply mailers may not be well served by investing in Goodmail to get them on ...but it isn't ever going to be a universal solution to this challenge.
Labeling
- AOL's existing labeling convention is not changing but they are adding a new icon for Certified Email. Non-whitelisted mailers and Standard Whitelisted Mailers will continue to be designated "unknown senders" whereas 1) those with addresses in the recipient's address book and 2) those on the enhanced whitelist will continue to be labeled "known senders".
- For those who believe that the Certified Email icon/labeling will make a difference ...consider 1) It is based on a proprietary NOT open-source authentication standard ... and thus, it is NOT going to be universally deployed (.."ever" is my guess when you consider it must be deployed at all ISPs and enterprises worldwide) and 2) you would have to teach your customers to rely-upon/only respond to emails with the Certified Email labeling to be fully effective and, having done so, must consider that a) prices may increase, b) those customers may move to an ISP/email client that does not use Goodmail, and c) the industry and/or other ISPs may rally around an open-source authentication and labeling methodology that makes all of this moot.
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