This will probably get us blacklisted from Comcast, but I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't show you this email I got on the Fourth of July..because you know, most people are sitting in front of their computers on major outdoor holidays. Comcast is pushing the fact they have very fast upload speeds and wanted to let their customers know, perhaps in an effort to somehow ease the pain of another rate increase.

Irrelevant content aside, the lack of best practices they used in constructing the email was surprising at best. As an ISP, they are one of the gateways for companies like ours in getting emails through to customers with an @comcast.com address. Like any gatekeeper, they want to ensure that the marketers using our system are reputable and following the right guidelines like a 70-30 text-to-image ratio in building emails, not 100% image. Spammers use 100% image-only to hide the dirty words so ISPs and spam filters can't directly scan and pull them out. Therefore, they really frown upon the practice and we do as well. Many marketers still go ahead and do it, which is why Inbox Experts like us exist.

Since Comcast isn't a trusted sender in my list, images were immediately disabled when the email arrived. Take a look at how it rendered in my Hotmail account:

Wow...that is one giant gray box. I realize that by being an ISP, they can obviously forgo a lot of the rules they establish, but as a party that is so crucial to the email delivering process, wouldn't it be a good thing if they practiced what they preached? The ability to educate and teach is something so many companies fail to do, especially in situations like this.

Here's the email was supposed to look by the way. Still boring.