In general, the more stars, the better your deliverability will be. So what’s your score?

Mailman Steve Padgett, age 58, stood before a Federal Court judge recently to receive his sentence. The crime? Delaying and destroying the very mail he was supposed to be delivering– third class mail, or more commonly, the JUNK.

This spring, authorities were contacted by a utility worker who noticed what appeared to be an excessive amount of mail piled at Steve Padgett’s home in Raleigh. When postal authorities went to investigate, they discovered third-class mail stacked in Padgett’s garage and buried in his lawn.

According to Padgett’s attorney Andrew McCoppin, it wasn’t a conscious stand against waste or a junk mail protest that spurred the mailman to hold onto the mailers. Rather, it was the inability to meet the demands of a job in a growing part of the county while contending with heart problems and complications from his diabetes.

Padgett was given probation, fined and also sentenced to 500 hours of community service.  And as a way to express our support for Mailman Steve and his junk mail minimizing tactics, MailChimp has helped bail him out by contributing to a fund that will cover Padgett’s fines.

How does this relate to email marketing you ask? Mailman Steve was keeping the spam out of people’s physical mailboxes, in the same way that MailChimp works to keep it out of your inbox. By taking simple steps like creating a good permission reminder and adhering to proper emarketing etiquette, you can take steps to ensure your email’s relevance and deliverability.

About 240,000 of them are “old” (inactive) subscribers. About 70,000 are relatively “new” (active) subscribers.

They recently segmented their list and sent the same newsletter to each group (separately) over the same IP address, about 6 hrs apart from each other. Around 2pm, they sent the newsletter to the large, inactive list. Around 8pm, they sent the same newsletter to the active list.

The results are eye-opening…

Stats for the “Inactives” list (241,832 recipients):

Spam Complaints: 43
Open Rate: 6%
Click Rate: 2.4% (and 7,688 total clicks)
Unsubscribes: 264
Bounces: 6,878 (2.8%)

Stats for the “Actives” list (69,642 recipients):

Spam Complaints: 3
Open Rate: 36.3%
Click Rate: 7.4% (and 6,925 total clicks)
Unsubscribes: 96
Bounces: 128 (0.18%)

The number of bounces for the “old-members-list” is what I’d call very high. The number of abuse reports (43) is what I’d call disturbing. These are humans clicking the “this is spam” button for a run-of-the-mill company newsletter.

More interesting is what happened to their deliverability for the old list. We measured it using ReturnPath’s Mailbox Monitor service. Here’s a screenshot:

As you can see, their emails went 100% missing from AOL and Hotmail, 80% from Yahoo, and 70% for Comcast.

Also, it’s almost a day later, and 20% of the “sent-to-old-members” list still hasn’t been delivered to Yahoo, because they keep getting deferred.

My guess is the sheer number of spam reports from the old list is what got them blocked, and therefore their emails have gone missing (here’s some explanation from AOL on how they measure IP reputation).

If you’ve got a bad reputation, you’ll get blocked by AOL (and most of the major ISPs). Comcast’s Postmaster lists how emails get throttled based on your “Sender Score.” The lower your score, the slower you’ll get delivered.

So how is your score determined?

AOL measures your IP reputation by:

• Spam complaints (from humans clicking the “spam button”)
• Spam filter triggers
• Bounces from undeliverable addresss (i.e. old lists)

I wish we had deliverability stats to show you how the “active-members-only” went, but we forgot to track the good one (d’oh). Maybe next time.

Even without a side-by-side deliverability comparison, the end result is clear: old lists suck.

They generate too many abuse complaints, which can get your entire campaign blocked by ISPs. Then, the active members who want your emails never get your message.

Related Stories:

• Desperation Marketing (see “living dead”)
• Why your email won’t get delivered
• ReturnPath’s Deliverability Best Practices Guide (PDF)
• Effects of old email lists (an oldie but goodie)

Ever thought about segmenting your email campaigns so that they only go to the “active” members on your list? Here’s how to do that in MailChimp.

According to George Bilbrey, AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo have implemented DKIM email authentication.

For those of you who don’t know, authentication is a way to prevent email forgeries, and it can improve your deliverability. The AOTA says Authentication has hit its “tipping point.”

Since 2004, when email authentication started to really pick up steam, ISPs have been testing (and changing) their support for authentication. Some use one method for inbound, and another for outbound. Some support all methods of authentication. Some have abandoned it, or are in limbo. It can be confusing.

So we compiled a chart of which ISPs are using which authentication methods over here.

Of course, we’ve also made authentication “MailChimp Easy:” Our customers can authenticate their email campaigns with one simple click, and we cover all the major authentication standards (DKIM, Domain Keys, SenderID, and SPF).

“The adoption of e-mail and domain authentication has reached its tipping point, exceeding 50% in several key metrics, according to the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance. The report found that 51% of the Fortune 500’s consumer-facing brands, 52% of the Fortune 500’s consumer-facing financial service brands and 54% of the top 300 brands in the Internet retailer segment are all using some form of e-mail authentication.”

You can read more about Authentication and how it affects consumer trust over at DMNews.

If you’re a MailChimp customer, you can authenticate all your email campaigns, just like the Fortune 500 brands do. It’ll make your emails look more trustworthy, and it’ll sometimes help you get through corporate email firewalls. And you can do this with one simple click. Here’s how to activate it (it’s free for all MailChimp customers).