FeedBlitz Starts Subscriber Deliverability Reporting

One of the challenges of sending out an email as a service is handling bounces, or non-deliverability notices (NDNs). An NDN, or "bounce", is received by FeedBlitz whenever an email address is invalid, or delivery is otherwise blocked. You want to know if the email addresses you're sending to are any good, and that your circulation metrics are valid. You therefore need to have a way to manage NDNs

But how? Bloglet never helped with this.

Use FeedBlitz, of course. Starting today, a number of changes are being rolled into FeedBlitz to facilitate subscriber management for syndicators, including significantly improved NDN handling and automated bad address management. Over the weekend, you will start to see an "alert" icon in your dashboards for email addresses which report failures.

FeedBlitz will continue to attempt to deliver the daily email to an address that reports a failure for up to 3 tries or 15 days (system-wide), whichever is the longer. At that point the email address will be marked as pending deletion, and it will be deleted (unless action is taken) the following day. A 15 day window is long enough to accommodate longer vacations and absences, but short enough to not overburden the infrastructure for too long by unnecessarily attempting to mail updates to dead accounts.

So as far as publishers are concerned, you can simply do nothing and it will all happen automatically. Better, however, to look at your undeliverable reports and actively manage your subscribers. If an address is obviously misspelled, for example, you can personally write to the correct address and invite the user to resubscribe. Or you can simply remove the user as a subscriber to your feed immediately, which saves the hassle later.

The first automated pruning will therefore take place in 15 days time, on September 10th. You may see a reduction in subscriber counts of around 5-10% or more, depending on the age and quality of your subscribers. Some of these email addresses could have been useless for years - it's just that Bloglet never told you about them. Now, at last, you can find out.

IMPORTANT EMAIL DELIVERY SERVICE NOTE: In order to better facilitate this automated email bounce handling, the sending email address for FeedBlitz messages will change starting Saturday, August 27. Updates up to now have been coming from updates@feedblitz.com

As of August 27, email updates will come instead from FeedBlitz@mail.feedblitz.com

Please update any filtering or white lists as appropriate. The FeedBlitz web site, as well as other FeedBlitz email addresses (such as info@feedblitz.com), will remain at feedblitz.com; it is only the sender information in the automated emails from the FeedBlitz service itself that will change.