One of my sites has the most, true-blue, restrictive email delivery obstacles on planet Earth … far more likely than any corporate email server — the U.S. federal government…. which has unruly restrictions on email delivery at highly secure military installations (including blocking images in HTML and/or tracking links from ESPs)

We use a variety of ESPs to serve this market (for ancillary product purchases from shopping carts, etc), but hands down, Aweber comes through for us for our email newsletter. Their severs are clean, and respected by the most worried IT security folks in in the U.S. Govt. We have had occasional issues with a federal agency blocking emails, but all were resolved with Aweber’s great staff.

Yes, they can follow more or less the rules (such as not allowing clients to upload crap lists to their server with just a credit card, etc.).

But if their clients turn around and send a bunch of crap out, and the ESP does not also clean the list from spam complaints on hotmail, gmail, or others (and penalize or get rid of clients that do this relentlessly overtime), then ALL their clients suffer from deliverability.

Like many likely here, I subscribe to hundreds of marketing-oriented newsletters… usually in one or two hotmail or gmail accounts. I watch and read them, but I also notice what email services they use, and what goes into the “junk/spam” folder…. and perhaps why (was it the service they used, or the wording in the message or subjecdt line?)

Bar none, those that use somethning like Aweber get through, time and time again.

Those that do not, are those that use things that might be popular ESPs in the “internet marketing” world, but don’t do “due diligence”.

While they are great services in many aspects, they do not unsub those subscribers that click on “this is spam” (which pollutes their lists and their servers for everyone else using them) — and they also attract many “get rich quick” internet marketers who don’t care about relevance or frequnncy, but just want to slam their email servers with whatever it takes to send a message…. relentless messages to convert a list to sales.

I think it’s worth while to take a look at who are the clients of an ESP, and watch how those clients use it. Sign up for lots of email newsletters. See who gets through. Then look at the service they use.

Yes, none of us like the restricxtive things like Aweber does (I mean we kind of all would like to just import lists and do whatever we want, etc.)… yet things like Aweber produce results in delivery.

And there is a reason for that.