I am a lawyer with economics, business, and technology background. I
still operate my own mail server, although for the last few years I have
been routing outgoing mails via MXRoute (thanks for the excellent
service) to work around the bad network neighborhood and other
deliverability obstacles. I generally dislike the oligopoly, no
specific corps in particular.
Sorry to read of your woes, but I am happy that one of the oligopolists
is shaking the tree and causing pain to the whole industry. Because it
is time for the industry to stop the growing VOLUME of emails and focus
on QUALITY. Less is more, despite technology's advancement that makes
more verbal diarrhea (LLMs) and feed it to the same limited number of
human recipients at higher frequency. ACCEPT THAT YOUR MARKET HAS GROWN
BEYOND USEFUL SIZE AND NEED A HEALTHY SHRINKING.
I see in this thread that some of you have diverted "higher quality"
traffic to servers/IP from where you usually send "lower quality" mails.
Think again: who/what defines the relevant quality?
My nemesis is not Microsoft when it operates inboxes. My nemesis is
Microsoft when it operates spamguns. And here is the schizofrenia that
is one cause of the pain: the dissociation between the mailbox operator
personality and the ESP personality, with opposite interests. My
interpretation of Outlook's message to ESPs is: cooperate or die.
Dear ESPs, your legitimate customers are my spammers. They overload my
inbox with low or negative value emails, and if Outlook users are like
me, they keep hitting the spam button when they get repetitive
reminders, consumer surveys, excessive status updates and other
communication that makes the transaction more time-consuming and
frustrating. The barely veiled attempts at upselling/cross-selling or
otherwise pollute consumer awareness by your legitimate customers are
counter-productive. I don't want their spam, and I don't want their
spam-filled apps either.
Microsoft may be creating some confusion. Introducing something novel
and still unknown to the rest of us. more power to them! Growing pains
are worth it if at the end of the tunnel there is less and more relevant
mail in my inbox. Relevant in my own view, not what your customer think
should be relevant to me.
A suggestion to you: teach your legitimate senders that less is more.
teach them to ask for permission (OPT-IN) not for forgiveness (OPT-OUT
that they anyway design so that they are meaningless). Teach them not
to be creeps. To send me only ONE invoice receipt. No reminder unless
I opted in to them explicitly. No consumers surveys. No shipping
updates. No status updates. No special offer. No. No. No. Just no,
unless I explicitly opted in. And no, not even a sample asking me to
opt in to "something new," or that they consider new because this time
is different, even if I am buying the exact same service.
Decode their base64 or otherwise obfuscated messages and add a link to
collect meaningful feedback from recipients. Not stupid GIF-trackers,
you won't get that feedback from savvy recipients. Also not surveys
funneled to parrot the feedback they want to hear instead of the
feedback they need you hear (and you need to act on).
Adapt.
cheers,
Yuv.
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