Monday, November 21, 2005

Email, whitelisting and Aweber

Like most internet marketers, I have multiple email accounts. Some I look on as primary accounts I monitor "live". I actually use gmail for that because I love the sorting features. If someone forces me to use a "non free email address", fine, I will just use an email associated with one of my 50+ domain names, and maybe... maybe it will get read sometime.

One of the services I use is Onet.pl, I suppose it is the Polish equivalent to Yahoo. They have free email accounts and paid ones with more features. It also isn't regarded by most filters as being a free email address ;)

Today I noticed that Dr. Mani, who previously was using another email solution, is moving his list gradually over to Aweber.

Importing subscribers to services is a royal pain, it is much better to send a compelling offer to one list, and get them to resubscribe on another.

Now I can understand why Dr. Mani is making the switch, I am sure he was having deliverability problems, and decided to try Aweber who make huge guarantees on email deliverability.

So I took up his "compelling offer" (and it really was), and signed up onto another of Dr. Mani's excellent email lists (this time run on Aweber). I am honestly on loads of his email lists.

And then I was shocked...

The "double opt-in" message generated automatically by Aweber... ended up in my spam folder.

I had whitelisted every single one of his previous email list addresses. I didn't expect to have to do it with Aweber, and haven't had to do it in the past.

I have no idea whose service Onet use to decide which email addresses are spam, but whoever they are, Aweber seem to have upset them.

Here is the contents of the email that ended up in my spam folder.


Hello Andrew,

We received your request for information from the
content-profits
group. Before we begin sending you the information you
requested, we want to be certain we have your permission.

-----------------------------------------------------------
CONFIRM
BY VISITING THE LINK BELOW:

There was
an optin link here



Click the link above to give us permission to
send you
information. It's fast and easy! If you cannot click the
full
URL above please copy and paste it into your web
browser.

Or, if you
prefer, reply to this message with the
confirmation key in the subject line.

-----------------------------------------------------------
If you
do not want to subscribe, simply ignore this message.

Thank You,
AWeber Systems, Inc.

95, 13th Street, Chennai, TN 60040, SINGAPORE

That is a totally default double opt-in message from Aweber that hit my spam folder. The worry is not Onet, which is only used by 3 (a guess) million people in Poland, but who provides their spam blocking code and database.



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