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How to fix delivery

For all of you that are asking “What do the ISPs want from us” Annalivia has posted a list of specifics that you can do to improve delivery.

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The delivery communication gap

There seems to be a general uptick in the number of specific questions that ESPs and commercial senders are asking recently. I’m getting them from clients, and I’m hearing similar stories from my various contacts over on the ISP side. The questions cover a wide range of areas in email delivery, but the underlying issue is really that there are no real fixed rules about email delivery anymore. The only rule is “send mail users want to receive” and there are no specific guidelines to how to do that.
This is frustrating for a lot of people. They want to know exactly how many complaints they need to stay under. They want to know what “engagement” means and how exactly the ISPs are measuring it. They want to know all of the metrics they need to meet in order to get mail to the inbox.
There is a lot of frustration among senders because they’re not getting the answers they think they need and they feel like the ISPs aren’t listening to them.
Likewise there is a lot of frustration among ISPs because they’re giving answers but they feel like they’re not being heard.
Some of the problem is truly a language difference. A lot of delivery people on the ESP side are marketers first and technologists second. They don’t have operational experience. They don’t have that any feel for the technology behind email and can’t map different failure modes onto their causes. Some of them don’t have any idea how email works under the covers. Likewise, a lot of postmaster people are technologists. They deeply understand their customers and their email servers and don’t speak marketing.
The other issue is the necessary secrecy. Postmasters have been burned in the past and so they have to be vague about what variables they are measuring and how they are weighting them.
All of this leads to a very adversarial environment.
I’ve been talking with a lot of people about this and none of us have any real answers to the solution. Senders say the ISPs should spend more time explaining to the senders what they need to do. ISPs say the senders should stop sending spam.
Am I quite off base here? Is there no communication gap? Am I just cynical and missing some obvious solution? Anyone have any suggestions on how to solve the issue?

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Tribes

Earlier Laura talked about a communication gap between ESPs and ISPs.
My take on it is that it’s something more than just a difficulty in communicating, rather it’s a division due to differences in personality and approach of those individuals whose primary interest is themselves and those whose primary interest is the health of the overall email ecosystem.
The former group (who I mentally refer to using the shorthand “frat boys“) want to make everything all about them, and their companies revenue, and their visibility in the industry, and their ego resume. Broad generalizations with little need for understanding are adequate to raise their visibility and keep them employed. Details aren’t that important to them. Dominating the conversation is. (Lest that sound negative, these are exactly the individuals who can thrive in sales, customer relations, bizdev and marketing environments.)
The latter (shorthand “utilitarians“) instinctively want to make email work well and to be useful for everyone. They want email to be a healthy, useful system and tend to believe that that means optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number. (If you’ve any philosophy background, think “felicific calculus as applied to email”). They tend to understand the system in much more detail than the frat boys, though maybe less than the mechanics. And they tend to be better at working together – as they’re more interested in hearing other peoples data in order to get better at what they do, rather than being there to convince others of their pre-decided agenda.
(There’s a third group I think of as “mechanics” who take more joy in the details of keeping the system running smoothly on a small scale, without much interest in the broader system, whether that be in a technical or business role. They tend not to be very interactive in public, though, so don’t have much impact at the level of conversations I’m thinking about).
While I hate the broad terms “senders” and “receivers” used to (falsely) divide the industry into two disjoint halves, I’m painting with a fairly broad brush here, so I’m going to stick with them.
There are quite a few of all three types of people at both senders and receivers – but their power and visibility varies.
At senders there’s a mix of frat boys and utilitarians in operational and policy making positions, but the frat boys tend to have a lot more public visibility – they’re the ones who are trying to be visible, to dominate the conversation, and they’re the people you tend to see doing all the talking and less of the listening, whether it be on industry mailing lists or at the microphone at a conference. Because of their greater visibility, they’re who you think of when you think of senders, and typically they’ll be the ones you end up interacting with most in any random mix of individuals from senders.
At receivers the  operational (as opposed to policy) level is where the real decision making power is as far as email is concerned, and it’s heavily dominated by the utilitarians. (In fact, the more visible frat boys I can think of who were in influential positions at receivers are mostly now working on behalf of senders).
Frat boys are very, very bad at communicating with utilitarians. And utilitarians find it very hard to discuss issues they consider serious with frat boys at anything deeper than a superficial level.
Mechanics aren’t great at communicating with strangers in anything other than a fairly friendly environment, but manage best with other mechanics or with utilitarians.
If you’re a C level manager at a sender, and you’re deciding which of your staff are well suited to collaborate with typical receiver staff that’s something important to consider. The public face of the recievers are probably utilitarians. Frat boys are the worst representatives to send out to talk to them.

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