In the world of email delivery, your IP address reputation is what it's all about. In days past, all you had to do was ensure that the emails going out of your system were clean, and the spam filters would pass them through into inboxes. Now, Internet Service Providers keep volumes of data on your IP addresses and what kind of email you send through them. They also keep data on frequency, volume, bounce count, and spam complaints. In order to optimize email deliverability, one must not only ensure that emails have non-spam-like content, but also that one keeps bounce counts and complaints low: if your IP drops e-mail to 10,000 bogus Yahoo addresses, Yahoo's going to assume the other 10,000 good addresses are receiving junk and handle it accordingly. Our member organizations control the first part of that equation, and (by being ethical mailers and not uploading spam lists) a portion of the second. But a very big part of keeping bounce counts and spam complaints within ISPs' operational limits happens out of DIA's shop through processes to automatically unsubscribe addresses that have gone sour. The very first time we get a report that a supporter's email account has gone permanently inactive -- a "hard bounce" -- we unsubscribe that record. This is always handled at the time of your email blast. In the database, we convert the user to a the classification "User Unknown" in the "Receive Email" field of the supporter's record. We also unsubscribe users with the classification "ISP Spam Report" when a supporter hits the "Report Spam" button in any of the major ISP email clients. We have to unsubscribe these email addresses immediately because not only has the supporter elevated the complaint to the ISP but has also flagged your email as spam, thereby affecting the further delivery of similar messages from your organization. And, of course, the other cases when we unsubscribe a supporter immediately occur when the user chooses to unsubscribe themselves, either through a web page or a link in an email. A successful unsubscribe today is a spam report not sent tomorrow. By doing these instantly, we stay on the good side of ISPs and keep the bounce count low -- and your delivery rates high. It's a difficult battle, but its one that we think we are winning. Delivery speeds are high, messages are reaching their destinations, and supporters are learning about important issues.