Hotmail announced a short while ago big changes to their Windows Live Hotmail accounts.  Both from a users perspective, but also from an email marketing perspective.

The changes are being put into place to reduce spam in inboxes but will also play a big factor in how your own campaigns are judged.  So let’s go through the features:

Trusted Sender Icon

This is initially intended to prevent phishing attempts and verifies authentic emails.  The problem for email marketers is that if you don’t have authentication set up on your sending domain, you will be marked as a potential phishing threat.

Sweep

Considered an alternative to the Spam button.  This is a tool by Windows to separate the actual Spam emails from legitimate emails that the user no longer wants but chooses the spam button as it’s easier to unsubscribe that way.

Sweep will now unclutter the users inbox with legitimate emails that they have signed up for but no longer want to receive in their inboxes; helping to prevent spam complaints against the legitimate senders.

Retrospective Message Deletion

This feature will delete a message that post-send turns out to receive too many complaints.  Once again, to prevent actual Spam and Phishing emails, this feature will punish those who don’t have proper list management and send to purchased lists.

Prompted Unsubscribe Notifications

Those “emotionally unsubscribed” from your list will now have more options to remove themselves from your list.  People who just delete your message without reading it, two or three times in a row will be asked if they want to be unsubscribed from future emails.

What does this mean to you?

Well, these functions are all good ideas in our opinion.  It promotes list health and also removes unwanted, irrelevant emails.  More than any point now, engagement and reputation will play a much bigger part in your campaigns if you want to succeed.

Make sure your unsubscribe links are easy to use and prominent as you could start losing your placing in hotmail inboxes.

Authentication is also a big thing.  You want your emails to be legitimate and have a trusted sender icon attached to your mails as not having it can only have an adverse effect on your campaigns.