Technology does not trump policy when it comes to delivery

Recently Ken Magill wrote an article looking at how an ESP was attempting to sell him services based on the ESPs ‘high deliverability rates.’ I commented that Ken was right, and I still think he is.
Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article, pointing out that the vast majority of things affecting delivery are under the control of the list owner, not under the control of the ESP. As they are both right, I clearly agree with them. I’ve also posted about reputation and delivery regularly.

While some of us agree wholeheartedly with Ken, he did receive comments from a few delivery people indicating they thought that ESPs should talk about how their technology could improve delivery for senders. Having had experience with customers of most (if not all) of the major ESPs, I would argue that most of the ESPs have roughly equivalent technology. Some may have slightly different bells and whistles, but those bells and whistles are not going to improve delivery on their own.
One commenter says, “ESP technology completely varies, and as ISPs increase ‘throttling’, the ESPs that can optimize throughput will have dramatically better deliverability than others.” What’s wrong with this statement? Nothing is wrong on the surface, it makes sense if you don’t know much about delivery and ISP rate limiting. However, in the last 12 – 18 months ISPs have really moved from one rate limit for all senders to dynamic limits based on the reputation and type of mail coming from a particular source.  Throttling at the major ISPs is mostly controlled by  reputation – they are dynamically assigning rate limits based on a senders’ short term and medium term reputation. If your ESP has to implement technology in order to cope with those limits on your behalf then your delivery through that ESP, by definition, has a problem.
Moving to an ESP that can dynamically “adjust” to ISP imposed limits may improve delivery over the short term, but will not do anything to fix the underlying reputation issues that are prompting the ISPs to throttle mail.
Another commenter says, “Some ESPs have better support structure in place than others, whether it’s technology, staff, or approach, to make marketers more successful.” I agree with some of this. Some ESPs do have better techology and staff and will hold marketers hands and help them improve delivery. In most cases, this revolves around actually making the marketers into better senders, teaching them about best practices and even forcing the sender to make changes or find another ESP. Rarely does the actual SMTP technology factor into this improvement.
There are a lot of technical things that ESPs could do to improve delivery, but that many (most?) of them don’t do. Two of the more obvious things ESPs could do technically to facilitate delivery improvements are:

  1. Send VALID and w3c compliant HTML mail. This is pretty easy to do with off the shelf or open source technology, but most ESPs don’t do any cleanup of the email format. Invalid HTML will hurt delivery. HTML from a MS Word document pasted into an email creates ugly, uncompliant, messy HTML that looks a whole lot like spam to ISP filters.
  2. Use data mining techniques to identify potential problem customers before mail is sent. I know one ESP is doing this very successfully, but most ESPs deal with problems reactively instead of proactively. It is better for everyone concerned if bad mail is caught before it goes out, not after.

Overall, I am a big supporter of ESPs. I think their technology and their policy expertise makes them a good vendor for the average company wanting to use email marketing. I think, though, that delivery and deliverability are under the control of the sender, not the ESP. An ESP that attempts to sell the idea that the technology is more important than practices and policies is misleading both themselves and their customers.

Goodmail sued for patent infringement
Delivery emergencies

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E-Postage Just Won't Die

E-Postage is back! Wired covers a report from New Scientist. Here’s what they have to say: “Yahoo’s researchers want you to voluntarily slap a one-cent stamp on your outgoing e-mails, with proceeds going to charity, in a bid to cut down on spam. Can doing good really do away with spam, which consumes 33 terawatt hours of electricity every year, not to mention way too much of our time?”
Alex Rubin at Return Path says hold up, wait a minute. He writes: “Our contacts at Yahoo! tell us this idea is purely in the research realm, and is not scheduled for development in Yahoo! Mail. In other words: it isn’t even vaporware and isn’t likely to be a part of the Yahoo! mail system anytime soon.” He goes on to say (I’m paraphrasing) that oops, Yahoo didn’t really intend for this research to become public.
So, apparently, there are no plans for Yahoo to roll out E-Postage today, tomorrow or next week. Nothing to see here, beyond a simple web site and some thoughts from a Yahoo researcher. Some individual’s hopeful vision for the future, not a corporate announcement of an upcoming product.
E-Postage has always been a neat idea, I’ve thought. A neat idea beset by insurmountable problems. First, end users don’t want to pay for the email messages they send, they want all you can eat. With years of webmail providers offering free email access, you’ll have a heck of a time convincing somebody’s grandmother that they have to pony up a nickel to be able to email the grandkids.
Then, answer me this: Who’s going to handle the economics on the back-end? And any time you have a computer storing a resource (like, say, account information for that tiny little bit of money you’ll need to be able to send me an email), that information can be hacked, exploited, stolen. You think spammers are actually going to pony up? Why would they? They’ll just hack into millions of exploitable computers, stealing five cents from everyone along the way, and gleefully shoveling millions of spams into millions of inboxes.
This concept of E-Postage, either paying money to send email, or spending “computational power” to send email, has been kicking around for years. Periodically, some researcher comes up with the idea anew, and suggests that we all immediately adopt their sure fire plan to solve the world’s spam problem, immediately, pennies at a time. These ideas never seem to go anywhere. And that will never change until somebody can actually convince most of the world to adopt their proposed scheme. Will it ever happen? Never say never, but I have no plans to rush out and buy e-Stamps any time soon.
— Al Iverson

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Permission Based Emails? Are you sure?

Yesterday I wrote about the ReturnPath study showing 21% of permission based email does not make it to the inbox. There are a number of reasons I can think of for this result, but I think one of the major ones is that not all the mail they are monitoring is permission based. I have no doubt that all of the RP customers say that the mail they’re sending is permission based, I also have no doubt that not all of the mail is.
Everyone who sends mail sends permission based email. Really! Just ask them!
In 10 years of professionally working with senders I have yet to find a marketer that says anything other than all their email is permission based. Every email marketer, from those who buy email addresses to those who do fully confirmed verified opt-in with a cherry on top will claim all their email is permission based. And some of the mailers I’ve worked with in the past have been listed on ROKSO. None of these mailers will ever admit that they are not sending permission based email.
Going back to ReturnPath’s data we don’t really know what permission based email means in this context and so we don’t know if the mail is legitimately or illegitimately blocked. My guess is that some significant percentage of the 20% of email to the probe accounts that doesn’t make it to the inbox is missing because the sender does not have clear recipient permission.
When even spammers describe their email as permission based email marketing, what value does the term have?

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Those addresses are costing you

Mark Brownlow has a post up about the hidden costs of bad email marketing. These center around brand damage, but there are other costs to poor email marketing strategies.
Previously, having old and non-responsive email addresses on a mailing list did not hurt and may have helped a reputation at an ISP. In some cases, these addresses may have even helped a reputation by increasing the number of emails delivered thus lowering the overall percentage of complaints.
More recently, some ISPs have started looking at the characteristics of recipients as part of the reputation score of a sender. If a sender is mailing a lot of abandoned email addresses, these ISPs can detect that fact. This counts against a senders reputation and may result in email ending up in the bulk folder or being blocked at the transaction.
Many senders are extremely resistant to removing old addresses from their lists. Some of the more numbers driven ones have even followed the statistics and can tell me exactly how many people ignore their email for 12 months or 18 months, and then come back and make a large purchase. This is true, sometimes people will ignore email for a long time and then come back. Keeping these people on a list may be beneficial.
However, in those recipients who ignore email (no opens, no clicks) for a long time are some addresses that have been abandoned. While these addresses are not spamtraps, repeatedly sending email to large numbers of abandoned addresses will lower the sender’s reputation over time.
All senders should have a process for dealing with non-active addresses. Allowing cruft to accumulate on a list does negatively affect reputation.

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