As of today, MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector (powered by Return Path) has added support for four new mobile environments; iPhone, Windows Mobile 6.5, Nokia/Symbian and Blackberry Curve. Inbox Inspector makes it one-click easy for you to generate screenshots showing how your email will render in the major desktop, web-based and mobile email apps.

See how your campaign will look on Nokia's N96 Series phone and more.

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ReturnPath just released their 2008 Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. There’s a lot of great data to digest here.

• Only about 20% of email servers out there are properly setup and can be considered “legit” email senders.
• Your Sender Score can be closely correlated with your Delivered Rate (something I assumed in this blog post, but couldn’t provide any proof—until now). Note that “delivered” means “it made it to the machine of your recipient” but doesn’t necessarily mean “it wasn’t spam filtered.” The mailman delivers your mail, but doesn’t know if recipients will rip it up and throw it away before reading it.
• Only 0.63% of email from legit servers can be classified as “Commercial.” That either means commercial email marketers are not sending as much email (and “clogging up the intertubes”) as we all thought, or that they’re all sending from illegit or unknown servers, and not following best practices.

Then, they give two big whoppers of insight:

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Most of the major ISPs have some sort of feedback loop (FBL) in place, where their users can report spam (learn more about feedback loops, and how they can affect your deliverability). Email marketing services like MailChimp have to sign up for all those ISPs’ feedback loops, so we can properly clean our users’ lists of complainers.

Just recently, MailChimp has experienced some amazing growth, and so we’ve had to add more IP addresses to our delivery queue. That means we’ve had to re-submit all our IPs to all the ISP FBLs again.

Normally, each ISP has its own FBL, with its own set of requirements, application process, review process, and reporting format.

This time around, we’re noticing that nearly all the FBL application emails we’re getting back from these ISPs look exactly the same. Then we figured out why: they’ve switched to ReturnPath’s FBL service. This is nice, because: 1) we’ve been ReturnPath partners for a long time, and 2) hopefully, we’ll all have a centralized FBL system to work with (and submit IPs to), instead of managing so many different accounts with so many different ISPs.

We’re getting more questions from customers with large email lists about sending their campaigns from a dedicated IP address, vs. using MailChimp’s “shared” pool of IPs.

They want to know if their deliverability will be any better if they use a dedicated IP.

It’s not a question we can answer with a simple “yes” or “no.”

Mark Brownlow has a good overview of all the different points to consider before sending from your own dedicated IP.

At MailChimp, whenever we setup a new IP address (either to add to our overall rotation, or a dedicated IP address for a high-volume customer) it takes time to “break it in.” Here’s what we go through…

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A few of our customers have been asking us about this bit of news from ReturnPath: AOL Changes Authentication and Whitelist Standards.

According to George Bilbrey, AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo have implemented DKIM email authentication.

For those of you who don’t know, authentication is a way to prevent email forgeries, and it can improve your deliverability. The AOTA says Authentication has hit its “tipping point.”

Since 2004, when email authentication started to really pick up steam, ISPs have been testing (and changing) their support for authentication. Some use one method for inbound, and another for outbound. Some support all methods of authentication. Some have abandoned it, or are in limbo. It can be confusing.

So we compiled a chart of which ISPs are using which authentication methods over here.

Of course, we’ve also made authentication “MailChimp Easy:” Our customers can authenticate their email campaigns with one simple click, and we cover all the major authentication standards (DKIM, Domain Keys, SenderID, and SPF).