New Feature: FeedBlitz List Quality Alerts

In order to help ensure that your list remains clean, starting today (August 16) FeedBlitz will send nightly alerts to publishers with apparent problems with their lists. If you get one, you can use these alerts to understand and deal with problems you may be facing immediately; we use these same alerts internally as one view into potential terms of service (TOS) abuse.

Every day, FeedBlitz monitors your core list metrics: the volume of messages sent, and then the number of bounced messages, unsubscribes and complaints that result. We have internal standards of what we expect to see for these metrics based on FeedBlitz's historic averages, ISP expectations and industry best practices.

If and when your list strays from these metrics, we'll send you a quality alert. The vast majority of you will never see one (nor should you, of course, since all your lists are properly opted in and compliant with the TOS). But just in case, here's what you'll see:

• The reason for the alert being sent, including the metric(s) that triggered the alert.
• The actions you should take and any other recommendations we may have for you.

Alerts will be sent daily until the situation resolves; they are configured to minimize false positives caused by transient issues.

The alerts enable you to proactively manage your list before we take any further action. Note, however, that egregious violations will be dealt with immediately without any prior notification. There are no warnings for those we believe to be deliberately abusing the service.

The FeedBlitz List Quality Alert service is your view into our stepped up TOS compliance monitoring processes, the technical changes I referred to at the end of this post. In that same post I mentioned both technical and economic changes to ensure that the risk of abuse is minimized. I'll be covering our economic changes in the next article.