I'm asking all my newsletter subscribers to validate their subscriptions, this week. It's a simple matter of clicking a link in an email. It effectively causes the subscriber to RE-subscribe.

Those of you who have done this with your own ezines, in the past, may wonder why I do this. Especially since we all know my numbers will decrease by anywhere from 50% to about 75%.

The reason is this ...

From Mark McCreary of www.Mail-List.com (my email delivery service):

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“It improves our reputation at the ISP's, where they know how many emails we deliver and how many are opened. Having a poor ratio of opened mails can cause delivery problems for all of our lists.

Some ISPs take old abandoned accounts, and consider them spam trap addresses - meaning that any email received is labeled as spam. So even though that person joined your list using the confirmed opt-in process, and never bothered to unsubscribe, we get blamed for being a spammer.

It also reduces the amount of times people report your email as spam. Since they are no longer getting it, so they can not click on the "Report as Spam" button. Again, this improves our reputation at the ISPs, as they monitor the ratio of deliveries to email reported as spam.

The industry wide average for email addresses going bad is 3 to 5 percent per month. That means over the course of a year, half of your subscribers have abandoned that email account. And since most ISPs now have very large or even unlimited mail boxes, we do not get back bounce messages telling us their mailbox is full.”
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In addition, my total number of subscribers has no meaning. The only meaning is in the number of my readers! Cleaning the list makes delivery to those readers even more assured.

I've also shortened the email version of the newsletter. AOL only delivers an email up to 15KB in size. It used to be 20 KB. And, they didn't even bother to consult me when they changed it! Umph!

BTW - if you need a new email service, I HIGHLY recommend Mark and www.Mail-List.com. I've found I don't NEED all the bells and whistles of some of the other services. What we ALL need is DELIVERY!

Nope - not an affiliate of this service. I simply recommend it. Did YOU know about this information from the ISPs?