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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... or I became incredibly popular overnight. Still, much love to Akismet, whose current count of spam comments caught is 92,315. I feel more popular already. Just not as popular as e.politics.

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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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The New Organizing Institute's three-day boot camp wrapped with a lighthearted session from Zack Exley which in my Day 3 notes is distinguished by nothing but the text of his single powerpoint slide. Zack ran a little confessional, goading attendees into owning up to e-activism sins both venal and cardinal, which elicited this priceless nugget whose author and origin we'll leave safely obscure...

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Back during World War II, the Soviets agitated increasingly impatiently for Roosevelt and Churchill to invade Europe in order to draw German military resources out of the eastern theater. What they got, at least until 1944 when the Red Army had pretty decisively turned the tide, was a lot of material aid via the Lend-Lease program ... to the point where Russians sarcastically referred to the Selected & Processed American Meats in circulation as "the second front." One of the nice things about working with nonprofits is that they're rarely of a mind to open a second front. But every once in a while ...

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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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