DemocracyInAction's mass-mailing needs have made it a case study for scaling delivery for our own e-mail vendor, Message Systems.  It's a bit inside baseball, but if you've ever wondered about the scope of DIA's e-mailing and what's involved in making that happen quickly after you hit the "send" button ...

[A]s opposed to 100,000 messages per hour [years ago], DIA can now send 1.5 million to 2 million e-mails an hour. ...

Delivery Manager software['s] real-time analytics allows DIA to immediately identify why a message doesn't reach its intended target.

DIA's deliverability rate now nears 99 percent, and blacklisting from ISPs is no longer an issue.

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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.

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Email. Its a pretty basic thing. You want to say "Hey" to our friend and invite him over for the game. So, you fire up that streamlined AJAX-y web client and fire off an email. Your friend gets the email, he says he'll bring the chips and beverages if you'll supply the main course and the TV. He'll even bring a few of his friends and that will be great. You reply back to his reply and the event is set. "What did we ever do without email?," you think. Then, the light bulb appears. "I'd bet we can apply this to what we do at work and I'd be a hero!", you say aloud. Unfortunately, you have only seen the tip of the cold, cold monolithic iceberg that is email deliverability.

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As readers of this space (both of you) have probably heard, AOL unveiled a new spam-control policy a few days ago to stentorian reaction online. Briefly stated, AOL (and Yahoo, soon) plan to charge a fee per e-mail to deliver mail to its subscribers through a program called Goodmail.

The notion of e-mail postage stamps as a spam control option has been floating around for a while (since postage fees do such a great job of preventing snail-mail spam), but this looks like both less and more than meets the eye. Less part first: it won't cost you, the average user, to send an individual message to yourbuddy@aol.com.

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