I’ve been having some trouble lately with my emails not getting through to folks. And it is getting a bit aggravating.
It used to be every now and then I’d not get a response from someone so I’d give them a call.
What do you think about my email?
I didn’t see an email from you.
Hmmm… Let me resend it…
It didn’t happen all that often. Just enough to make me wonder what folks were doing on their end. But these days it seems to be getting more frequent. Frequent enough that I suspect the problem is on my end.
Since I started SuccessCREEations I’ve been using FeedBurner’s Headline Animator in my default email signature. It looks like this:
It seems to me to be a great, catchy way to get the word out about my blog.
I’ve got multiple email addresses I use. I’ve got way too many addresses. Drives me a little nuts. But that’s the reality of the blogging world sometimes.
It doesn’t seem to matter which addresses I send from. When I find one that hasn’t gotten through, I’ll resend it deleting the signature and then they get it.
Just last night I sent a couple emails to my wife. (Yes I know that’s a sorry commentary on the state of marital communications that I’m emailing to the other room. We do talk, audibly, with our voices. Honest.) And both of them ended up captured by her spam filter. And in that case it was bellsouth to bellsouth addresses!
A catchy way to promote your blog is ineffective if it is causing your emails to end up trapped in people’s spam filters. I think I’m going to have to say goodbye to Feedburner’s Headline Animator. 
I hate it. But I hate my communication not getting through more.
Well I didn’t even get that in my RSS reader but I think this is a case of using e-mail for something it was not really intended for. Truthfully it’s not your fault as e-mail standards in their current form have not really caught up well with the rest of the Internet. In my opinion e-mail needs to be totally re-engineered. It not really designed for sending large attachments but people use it for that anyway, it’s not secure and one of the biggest security holes out there. Sorry to go on a rant but this is a big beef of mine as I the thing my customers complain about the most is e-mail and it usually boils down to users using it as an ftp or web browser application.
I think what you are running into is e-mail programs are trying rig their small economy car as a secure truck/van when we really should be using a new vehicle instead old one that has been “rigged up”.
If I had it my way I would incorporate secure ftp (SFTP or something similiar) into the e-mail program so for instance if I sent a file over a certain size it would get dumped into a folder on my e-mail/ftp server and send the link to download it instead of the file to the receiver of the message instead of clogging up their inbox. I’d also make authentication of messages required and none of this using third party stuff that “no one” ever uses. I’d also make e-mail newsletters a thing of the past and incorporate RSS more deeply into the system.
it’s interesting how web browsers have jumped so far hard of e-mail clients.
But it’s only 1 little gif. [he protested smoothly like the waiter to Mr. Creosote]
Sounds like you might appreciate this call center humor, Patrick.
Can’t much disagree with anything you said, either.
Hey Chris,
Sorry to hear that you’re having trouble with our Headline Animator. I use it everyday and I don’t have much trouble. The thing with spam filters is that everyone is a bit different. Ff it’s bayesian (like Gmail), and they’ve marked as spam a bunch of emails with GIFs in them, it could start thinking email msgs with GIFs are spam.
We want to make sure that we aren’t hindering your delivery of your email. We’re always looking for feedback, so don’t ever hesitate to give us a shout at publishers@feedburner.com.
Jake Parrillo
Publisher Services Team
FeedBurner
This is pretty much the reason I’ve yet to install FeedBurner’s Headline Animator. I knew that I’d have the same experience. We can thank all the spammers out there for making it a bit more unfriendly for us legitimate users.
Hey Jake! Thanks for responding. I’ve been very resistant to ditching the headline animator because I like it so much. (I haven’t even gotten rid of it yet.)
I’m with Dawud that it stinks that us legitimate folks are getting penalized because spammers are so, well…, evil.
When I was having trouble just now and then I could live with it.
But in the last 24 hours I know of 6 different emails to different folks that didn’t get delivered. One was to a Gmail account, one to an MSN account, two were to BellSouth accounts, and two were to different corporate email accounts.
If all these folks, most of whom I correspond with regularly, have servers that are flagging me as spam with the gif, I’m afraid I gotta let it go.
It stinks. But what choice do I have?