WHEN AN AOL executive asks bulk e-mailers to stop sending e-mail, should they comply? Maybe, but not immediately, judging by the actions of some marketers during a recent e-mail meltdown at the Web portal.
Millions of people trying to send e-mail to and from AOL addresses experienced trouble June 1 starting at around 11 a.m. EDT. The service was back up that afternoon at about 4 p.m., said a spokesman for the Dulles, VA-based Time Warner subsidiary.
The incident sent e-mail service provider executives into a gut-wrenching scramble as they tried to figure out what was happening — and most importantly, what they should tell their clients.
It also shed light on an unusual relationship among a group of professionals who work for competing service firms.
During the crisis, a panicky e-mail from an AOL employee asked bulk mailers to stop sending messages into AOL's system until the cause of the crash could be determined.
“We are having a massive internal systems failure and are asking anyone and everyone that sends us a lot of mail to either stop (bulkmailers) or choke it (ISPs, hosting companies),” said the message from “Anna.”
It continued: “If any of y'all can help, we would be most grateful. I do not ask this of anyone lightly. I know it's a huge and costly pain in the ass. Believe me, it is for us also, and right now we are [temporarily blocking] the world anyway, so if you can help take some of the load off, your mail is more likely to arrive sooner anyway.”
Another source inside AOL, however, said nothing was wrong, leaving the service providers in a serious bind: Should they tell their clients to stop mailing and possibly lose the revenue from AOL subscribers?
AOL addresses typically make up between 25% and 30% of a business-to-consumer marketer's list.
“I don't want to go into fire-drill mode here and put my clients in a panic until I can figure out what's going on,” said one e-mail executive just after the message from Anna arrived. This person asked not to be named.
As the episode unfolded, an estimated 15 to 20 deliverability specialists for the industry's top e-mail service firms were e-mailing, calling and instant messaging one another trying to puzzle out the situation.
A couple of the group's members managed to get Anna's message verified by two other AOL employees and then executives began planning what to do next.
These e-mail deliverability specialists — also known as Internet service provider (ISP) relations executives — work for companies that battle one another ruthlessly for market share, yet they are in daily contact on an Internet discussion group aimed at solving deliverability problems.
“It's the type of group that's very open,” said Spencer Kollas, director for deliverability services at Premiere Global Services. “If someone is having an issue or noticing something going on they'll e-mail the entire group, saying ‘What do you know about this?’”
They even socialize at conferences. And on this particular day, some of them were at the Inbox e-mail conference in San Jose, CA and began sending messages on laptops and handhelds during a keynote presentation.
“We're all trying to get the same thing accomplished,” said Kollas. “We're trying to get the e-mail into the inbox, so it doesn't matter who your clients are vs. who my clients are.”
Tricia Robinson, Premiere's vice president for marketing and strategy, added: “That is the one area of our industry that's collaborative. The rest of us don't work together like that.”
For its part, once Premiere verified the problem, it immediately halted 11,000 messages that were ready to be sent, and then contacted clients to let them know what was going on.
However, the relationship between the deliverability execs doesn't mean they operate in lockstep. Several well-known companies did not suppress AOL addresses during the crisis.
A representative of one of those companies who asked not to be identified said the company decided not to stop mailing because AOL was not trashing the messages; it was simply putting them in a queue.
“These were delays, not failures,” said the executive. “It was a traffic jam.”
But the decision to continue mailing gave the firms no competitive advantage, according to Robinson.
“If anything, we believe we're a better steward of AOL's gate by doing what it asks,” she said. “Just like direct mail is at the mercy of the U.S. Postal Service, we're at the mercy of the ISPs. We should be thankful that they reach out to us when they have problems instead of [blocking] all the mail.”
In the end, everyone's e-mail seems to have been delivered and there was no adverse financial impact on commercial mailers, Robinson said.
“We couldn't have asked [AOL] to have handled it better,” she added. “We didn't have to go asking for the information. [AOL] came to us.”
AOL Crisis Timeline
June 1, 2006, 11 a.m. EDT: AOL begins experiencing ‘massive internal system failures.’
11:30 a.m.: An e-mail from ‘Anna’ at AOL asks e-mail service providers to suppress AOL addresses.
4 p.m.: AOL gets its e-mail systems working again.
5:30 p.m.: AOL gives mailers the ‘all clear.’
June 2, 2006, 3 a.m. EDT: Those who suppressed AOL addresses start mailing them again.
