Things are growing yet again at work and with it the number of people needed to keep things flowing smoothly. This time it’s the Sales Engineer team that needs a new person, working in the Baltimore/Washington area (our home office):

Responsibilities

• Provide exemplary pre-sales technical expertise through technical and product presentations, product demonstrations, pilot implementations, beta program administration, consistent communication, and on-going technical consultation.
• Translate complex technical problems for non-technical clients as well as translating non-technical specifications into precise technical requirements.
• Meet with clients to evaluate their current systems and needs and make recommendations for software and hardware and integration.
• Travel approximately 30% in support of sales and customer activities.
• Respond to RFIs, RFPs and serve as …

According to the MailChimp blog there’s a new program in place at Gmail that allows images in a message to be turned on by default with the following requirements:

• There has to be authentication in place (either SPF or DKIM).
• The recipient has to have sent at least 2 messages in the past to the sender.

Now that second one can be a challenge since a lot of senders do not use a reply-to address that their customers are sending to (in fact many use a noreply address), meaning that none of their subscribers will accumulate two sends and therefore never see images on by default.

Essentially senders need to start using a reply-to address that customers can use, and ideally one that they would otherwise use. As an example a support@ address would be used independently of the mailing, adding the …

Recently Digg linked to an article titled ‘Comcast Caught Filtering Political E-Mails‘.

The short version is that an online special interest group noticed that they were having issues with mail not being delivered when sent to Comcast addresses. They then worked their way though the Comcast abuse department to finally find that Symantec’s Brightmail was filtering on their domain name and identifying all their messages as spam. The cause for the block? 46,000 complaints filed against messages that contained the domain name of the special interest group. Symantec, once contacted was quick to remove the domain from its filters.

There’s a few lessons to be learned here about filtering and deliverability, first let’s look at …