Have you joined my incredibly non-annoying, once-in-a-while email newsletter?
OK… Got some pretty cool HARO news today…
As you know, HARO is experiencing explosive growth. It’s beyond insane how quickly HARO has grown – we’re beyond thrilled, of course, but with this new power, comes awesome responsibility, as it were. So on Wednesday, HARO will be moving to a new email service provider (ESP). Take five seconds and read this this message, because we’ll touch on what you need to do NOW to make sure you continue to receive the HARO without a problem.
WHAT
After a multi-solution review, HARO has selected CheetahMail as our new ESP. CheetahMail is going to allow us to provide you with a higher degree of deliverability and timeliness for receipt of your HAROs. As you know, getting a 5am deadline query at 11:30am doesn’t help anyone.
WHEN
Wednesday morning, October 14th, starting with the morning issue of HARO, we will be delivering through CheetahMail from that point forward.
HOW
If all goes as planned next week, this will be a seamless transition. We’re simply migrating all existing subscribers over to the new provider. Wednesday morning you’ll receive the HARO as you always have. Those of you who are on the Gift Bag list will also receive that as you always have. Same HARO, different newsboy delivering the news.
CHANGES THAT MAY POSSIBLY AFFECT YOUR RECEIPT OF HARO
Effective Wednesday morning, we are changing the FROM: headers in both the HARO list and the GiftBag list. Note that if you have previously added [email protected] to your address book or to your IT department’s whitelist as a trusted sender, you don’t need to change that.
You DO, however, need to add the following addresses to your address books. Especially if you are an Earthlink or Mindspring customer, you will need to add the following to your spam blocker address book via your web interface. If you do not know how to do this, please contact your ISP for help, but chances are, just adding the addresses below to your address book should handle it.
HARO NEW SENDER ADDRESSES
The new sender addresses for both the HARO and the HARO Gift Bag Product List are [email protected]
WHAT HAPPENS IF THE HARO STOPS COMING? (I.e., our #1 question: “WHERE’S MY HARO?”)
This is, by far, the most frequently asked question we receive at the HARO Help Desk. To make it clear: We have NEVER not sent out a HARO on time. However… There are many places along the line between us and your desktop where HARO could be mistakenly filtered. The two most common ones are your corporate firewall or your organization’s spam filter and your desktop email client. 99% of the time, the problem is on your end, not ours. It doesn’t mean we don’t love you, and chances are, we didn’t ban you for off-topic pitching. It just means you gotta fix it. So here’s how:
1. Add the new sender addresses to your email client’s address book.
2. If you know that your company or agency is using a server-side spam filter (Barracuda, etc.) that filters for spam before the email reaches your desk, it’s probably a wise idea to notify your IT department of the new sender addresses above and ask that they be added as trusted senders to any and every solution that they have in place that filters inbound email to your firm. IT Department whitelisting involves whitelisting the sender address at the mail server or corporate network spam filters. If your IT department has any specific questions, they can reach our deliverability team by writing to [email protected].
3. Read up at this link below, find your email client or ISP and make sure you follow the instructions to ensure delivery success:
Instructions for Delivery Success
4. We are telling you all of this NOW, on Monday, so that if Wednesday rolls around and by 9am Eastern you haven’t received the morning HARO, but you HAVE done all of the above, we’ll be able to look into specific issues and get you back on track right away.
5) One final point: Prior to this change, when you wanted to email me and ask a question about the HARO, or ask about advertising info, or just invite me over for Pizza, you could simply respond to the HARO. With this change, the HAROs will no longer come from [email protected]. That said, continue to invite me over for pizza – just drop me a regular note at my email address. Replying to a HARO won’t work.
Hopefully there will be very few problems if you follow the above instructions prior to end of day Tuesday, but if you do have trouble on Wednesday, please feel free to send an email to: [email protected]. When and if you do write, it would help tremendously if you provided your phone number and the name of your Internet Service Provider, so we can get a sense whether any delivery issues are specific to one ISP and know who to call.
We’re excited for this – It’s going to be a good move, one which will allow us to scale at the speed we want to scale. And by the way – this is just phase one. In the next month to 45-days, you’re going to see more amazing changes at HARO. We’re stoked. You should be, too.
Blue skies,
Peter Shankman
