We’ve been monitoring what appears to be a deliverability delay at the ISP. Since about 7am PST/10am EST, mail bound for AOL has been delayed without any bounces sent back to the mailer. This scenario is generally indicative of a problem at the ISP; when the issue is corrected the queues will drain and mail will arrive to the intended recipient.
However, in the mean time don’t expect to see any bounces, or any clicks or reads for that matter until the message queues are cleared of mail. We ran the following delivery chart across all our clients showing the impact of the delay. You can see that around 9am CST delivery to the ISP began to plummet. In the past AOL has asked marketers, when the problems were bad and there were massive issues on the back end, to slow down or halt mailings to their domain to allow them to fix the issues. There have been no such requests made, nor any announcements of any problems so we’re assuming the problem is well in hand—or at the very least, hoping that’s the case.
AOL Delivery 4/27/2010 12:00am – 12:00pm CST
Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
Director of Deliverability & Messaging
Unica | Pivotal Veracity
