Like most people I think email has gone to hell in a handbasket. What once was the coolest idea the world has seen is ruined by a bunch of Russian crooks, their Trojans, and their ads for things which promise to improve my performance in the sack.
Because of these jerks the single biggest innovation in business is now discredited, to the point where the young and tech-savvy won’t even use it. They use Instant Messaging instead (and so do I as a result) which is even more intrusive than the phone. Life was supposed to get easier, right? Well we all know this, so why the rant?
We have this really neat technology - Webrequest - which uses email to deliver webpage questionnaires. It has lots of really useful features and reduces the cost of finding out stuff to virtually nothing. It’s also a new way to deliver marketing messages.
We’ve used it quite a lot over the last few days, inviting small businesses to use Front Office Box for free. BUT we didn’t get any response which obviously caused concern.
Investigating further we found AOL had returned all of our emails to its accounts, because we didn’t have reverse DNS and SPF set up - fixed now. Digging a bit deeper we came across a post complaining how Yahoo automatically cans any email coming from an IP address which hosts multiple domains - like our VPS. You can bet Yahoo doesn’t exclude its own mail addresses, and it’s a fair bet all of the other ISPs are doing something similar.
This seems to be a relatively new thing for AOL and Yahoo, but does anybody remember them announcing to users the restrictions in email service - not me.
So, if you’re using an ISP for email, you’re probably not getting a chance to decide which messages are ones you want, because these guys arbitrarily decide not to deliver them.
Wonder how long it will be before they start competing on how much of their mail gets through.
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