Most of todays email clients and webmail providers disable displaying images by default. They make an exception sometimes, when your subscriber adds your address to his or her contactlist then your mails will be accepted and images will be displayed by default.

Wouldn't it be great if more subscribers started adding you to their address book ? Why not take advantage of the opportunity ... for every image in an email marketing campaign you can add a so called "ALT" text. This is the text that will be shown next to the red cross when image displaying is turned off.

From the AOL Postmaster blog

Due to network issues, AOL is currently operating in reputation red mode.

If you are an Internet sender, and your IP's reputation is:

red: your emails will be temp-failed until the outage is resolved;
yellow or undisclosed: depending on server load, some portion of your emails may be temp-failed;
green: you should experience no delays in delivery.

If you are an AOL member:
You will see delays in sending and receiving emails.

I will post when the issue has cleared.

**The issue was resolved around 1:30PM on 5/18, but we will remain in Reputation Red mode until our queues drain. Members should no longer see delays in sending email.**

Since Google (GMAIL) changed its deliverability rules early april 2011 some customers might see a drop in Inbox delivery rate. Google is moving more and more towards an engagement based filtering algorithm and customers who do not have an engaged Gmail audience will suffer from these changes.

Although it’s not exactly clear which components way in more than the other it’s safe to say that

We are currently seeing some temporary delivery issues to some Yahoo MX servers.
Delivery time will be affected and our delivery team is closely monitoring.

More specifically the errors returned are of the type : 420 resources unavailable temporarily .

We are currently seeing some connection issues to our SMTP Gateways. Our technical team is putting everything in place to resolve the issues as soon as possible.
We will keep you posted via our blog.

Our sincere apologies to our customers.

UPDATE 13:55 GMT+1 : All systems are up and running again. The resourcing Ip's that started an DdoS attack on our systems have been blocked.
We'd like to again apologies sincerely to our customers and are open to further inquiries via our customerportal.