You are always the apple of our eye and an absolutely astounding member of the alphabet. You begin names like “AOL” and “Apple.” We cannot adequately express how appreciative we are, but we’ve made an attempt by singing this song in your honor. Thank you Letter A.
There are two noteworthy items for my blog today, and with both being associated with the letter “A” I couldn’t help but throw a bit of Sesame Street letter fun out there.
First up is the news that Verizon Communications has purchased AOL for $4.4B with a plan use AOL’s strengths to boost their presence in the mobile video and advertising arena. The ink isn’t dry yet on this deal so I haven’t heard a whisper about changes the AOL email system; I will be listening for such information and plan to provide update if that does occur.
The other bit of “A” news is the publishing of a new postmaster support page by Apple for its iCloud Mail system. This would be for their icloud.com, mac.com and me.com domains. For the most part, this postmaster info is a collection of best practices that have been suggested by receivers (and deliverability people such as myself) for some time. In fact, they even reference the recently updated M3AAWG Sender Best Common Practices Doc:
- Send only to recipients who explicitly subscribed to your emails (not list purchases, list rentals, or email appends).
- Offer an unsubscribe link, so that the recipient can unsubscribe immediately.
- Ensure emails are compliant with RFC 5322.
- Publish reverse DNS with your domain to help identify your IP addresses.
- Use consistent sending IP addresses and domains for your bulk email, but do segment marketing and transactional email streams.
- Use a consistent from name and address to clearly identify your brand.
- Make use of Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to authenticate your emails.
- Track the temporary and permanent SMTP errors from our mail servers and act on them accordingly.
- Have a standard policy for handling bouncing addresses.
- Periodically remove inactive subscribers from your list.
- Don’t reactivate email addresses that are already on your unsubscribe or suppression list.
There is also information on the postmaster site about an iCloud Mail whitelist (they don’t offer one) and complaint feedback loop (nope, they don’t offer one of those either). They make a point to note that they do authenticate all inbound mail using SPF and DKIM. If you haven’t done so already, this would be yet another reminder that you should be properly authenticating your organization’s mail. If you need guidance on SPF and DKIM setup, contact your eMarketing Advisor at Informz.
If all else fails, an email address is provided for contacting the iCloud Mail postmaster team. Be cautioned though, this will be a waste of your time and theirs if you haven’t actually followed their best practice recommendations!
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