The From Line

When you start an email marketing campaign, capturing the attention of your customers is the primary goal. That means making your email creative in some way. A preview pane is a very easy method to do just that.

Understand the Basics of a Preview Pane

The preview or reading pane is a common feature on most email systems, such as Outlook and Yahoo! Mail. It allows viewers to preview messages in their inbox without opening them. This enables them to view messages safely without the possibility of activating or opening malicious scripts or attachments.

The benefit to your marketing campaign is you allow your recipients to glimpse your message before they open it. If it looks like spam, they delete it immediately. If it appears to be from someone familiar – like a reputable brand – they open it.

Therefore, the subject and look of your email message are critical to catching the eye and attention of your recipients. Things you don’t want readers to see until the end – unsubscribe, disclaimers, and such – should be left until the end.

Building a Good Preview Pane

As this MarketingSherpa blog suggests:

The preview pane is your prime real estate to pull people into your email. In conjunction with the sender address and subject line, it’s the key to getting people to read your email.

Just received the following from the Yahoo! Postmaster team.

"We're seeing intermittent connectivity issues across our yahoo.com MXes starting early this morning.

If you are suddenly seeing queues to Yahoo! Mail, please stay tuned for updates and please refrain (at least for now) from contacting our Postmaster team about any deferral issues you started experiencing today. We're doing our best to get this resolved ASAP."

I will update again once I receive an update.

There has been a small buzz growing about Yahoo!’s recent connectivity issues. Because sending to Yahoo! is so important to email marketers, I want to clarify some of the key points. For those of you who are reading this blog for the first time in a while, you may be unaware of any connectivity issues at all. So let me provide a brief recap to get everyone up to speed.

Yahoo! has been experiencing intermittent connectivity issues since January 26th, 2010. Therefore, when you send a message to a Yahoo! account (i.e. people with @yahoo.com, @ymail.com, @rocketmail.com @att.net, @sbcglobal.net email addresses) your message could take longer than normal to reach the inbox. It also means that the problem is sporadic, so connectivity might be fine this morning and difficult tonight. This is commonly referred to as the message being “deferred” by the Yahoo! mail servers.  Besides the small list from above, Yahoo! hosts mail servers for many more organizations worldwide.

Once we were alerted of the issue on January 26th,  we communicated as much information to our clients as possible. Our clients send email to Yahoo!’s servers all the time, so we knew the issue would be important to almost everybody. While we didn’t have much information to share, we still thought it was important to notify everyone immediately despite the potential confusion it might cause.

Internally, we speculated this might cause some confusion among users who rely on us as their Email Service Provider to distribute their campaigns. The biggest challenge with this type of alert is that it often makes it appear it was our fault they were having connectivity issues to Yahoo!. Questions immediately began coming in asking, “When is Gold Lasso going to solve this?”

So to clarify: This in no way was a result of anything any Email Service Providers have done. All ESPs are sharing the industry-wide challenge of delivering email to Yahoo! during their intermittent connectivity issues, and no ESPs are to blame. This is purely an issue on Yahoo!’s side. It’s very unfortunate that they have been struggling for almost two weeks to remedy the situation, and we hope they are able to bring it to a close very soon. The only thing we can do to help is continue to keep the public informed, communicate any updates provided to us by Yahoo!, and educate on who and what is affected.

Here is the background to outline the ongoing issue and then I will chime in my two cents on the situation.

Back on January 26th, Yahoo! began reporting connectivity issues through their YmailAdmin group with this message:

“If you're seeing some queuing in your outbounds today when sending to Y! users,
we're currently experiencing low connectivity across our MTAs, which started
this morning. We're working to get things back to normal.

The SMTP error message being generated by the issue should be:

"420 Resources unavailable temporarily. Please try later
hostname>"

Our apologies for the inconvenience..

This mostly went unnoticed unless you were a member of the YmailAdmin group (or an email administrator watching log files or monitoring their MTA’s).  It was speculated that Goodmail was the cause of the connectivity issues however Goodmail reported that the Yahoo! issues had nothing to do with them.  These rumors may have been because of Yahoo! and Goodmail’s recent public divorce and people were just looking for a scapegoat.  A few hours after it was reported through the ymail group, this message was posted:

Our MTAs' connectivity levels are stable and back to normal, folks. Thanks for
hanging in there.

Even though it was reported late that night that the issue was resolved, a few hours later (early the next morning on January 27th) the issues began again. This time it took a while (mid evening on the 27th) for Yahoo! to confirm the ongoing issue with the below message:

Sorry for the late update, but as I'm sure most of the senders have noticed,
we're again experiencing low connectivity on our MTAs, starting very early this
morning.

We're working hard to restore the connectivity to normal levels, and I'll post
an update as soon as I have some good news.

These types of messages have continued off and on up until February 5th when they reported the below message. This was the last message since the 5th that they have posted:

Our connectivity levels have been stable since Wednesday noon (PST). That said,
we are still investigating reports of timeouts when trying to open a connection,
as well as dropped connections during the DATA portion of the SMTP transaction.

Updates to follow as developments arise. Thanks.

I feel that Yahoo! did a fair job of keeping the community up to date with their progress. What concerns me is that there has been no update since February 5th regarding timeouts and dropped connections which leads me to believe that they are still experiencing at the least intermittent issues.  Yahoo! has always been one of the toughest ISP’s to deliver to and these recent issues haven’t made that task any easier for marketers. With the amount of yahoo addresses (as well as the many companies using Yahoo!’s MTA’s to host their mail) Yahoo! has a lot to shoulder in terms of users counting on them for sending and delivering mail day in and day out and we wish them the best of luck putting this behind them.

We will continue to update our clients as well as post publicly as we receive information on the issue. Meanwhile, please let a Gold Lasso Representative know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions.

AOL is currently experiencing issues which are causing incorrect error codes to be issued.  This is an issue on AOL's side and they are currently working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.  We will keep you updated as soon as they have a resolution.  Here is what the AOL Postmaster Blog is reporting...

"We are at present issuing a "451 4.3.0

This is not replacing the existing two codes:

500, text= 5.1.1 : Recipient address rejected: aol.com

and

550 Mailbox not found

Senders using scripts to remove unknown users automatically should be looking for all three codes for the moment.

AOL AntiSpam"

Guess who's back, back again?  Yahoo connectivity issues are back, tell a friend...

It looks as though the connectivity issue has once again reared it's ugly head for Yahoo.  At least this time the SMTP error message is different (if that helps.)  Our clients can follow this developing story in the Gold Lasso Client Portal.  Good luck to Yahoo on getting this resolved permanently and putting this all behind them.

Below is the message that I received from the Yahoo Postmaster Team...

##########################

At around 6am PST, we again started experiencing low connectivity on our MXes, and we have since been working incessantly to improve the situation. As before, the SMTP error message being generated by the issue will generally be the following:

"420 Resources unavailable temporarily. Please try later

However, some senders may see our other "421" SMTP error messages as well, as listed here:

http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/

Ensuring that email is delivered in a timely manner is of the utmost importance and priority for us, so we appreciate your patience while we work on the issue.

Best regards,

Yahoo! Mail