What makes a good ESP?

There are a number of things that make a responsible ESP, including setting and enforcing standards higher than those set by the ISPs.
One of the responsible ESPs is Mailchimp. (Full disclaimer, I do consult for Mailchimp.) This ESP focuses on businesses with small to medium sized lists. They screen new customers for source of permission as well as mail content.
As well as putting a human in the loop and identifying problem customers manually, they have also developed an automated process that predicts the likelihood that a certain customer will violate their standards. This process is very similar to the reputation process in place at many ISPs. Customers that are flagged as potential problems are reviewed by staff members who contact the customer for further clarification.
What’s the benefit of this process? A good reputation, a clean customer base and positive notice by the ISPs. In fact,  just recently I was contacted by one of the very large consumer ISPs, confirming that Mailchimp is one of my clients. He informed me that he’d noticed a few of the Mailchimp IPs had a really high reputation but weren’t whitelisted. He asked me to send him all of their IPs so he could make sure all their IPs were whitelisted.
Proactive auditing of customers and predictive modeling of mailing results is working for Mailchimp and their customers.
Some ESPs have aggressive cancellation policies, which helps them police their networks and their customers. I often encounter former customers of these ESPs, either as direct clients or as customers of my ESP clients. In one case, I was asking around about a new client at their old ESP. “They tell me they left you under their own power and there was no spam issue involved, can you comment?” The policy person would not comment specifically about that client, but did comment that “95% of our former customers were disconnected for cause.”
These are two examples of ESPs that are working hard to minimize the amount of unwanted mail going through their network. They have invested time and energy into tools and staff to monitor the network. Staff is empowered to make decisions about customers and management believes no customer is “to big to disconnect.”
Tomorrow we’ll look at typical ESPs and their normal practices.

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AOL EWL: low complaints no longer enough

This morning AOL announced some changes to their Enhanced White List. Given I’ve not talked very much about the AOL EWL in the past, this is as good a time as any to talk about it.
The AOL Enhanced Whitelist is for those senders that have very good practices. Senders on the EWL not only get their mail delivered to the inbox, but also have links and images enabled by default. Placement on the EWL is done solely on the basis of mail performance and only the best senders get on the list.
The new announcement this morning says that AOL will take more into account than just complaints. Previously, senders with the lowest complaint rates qualified for the EWL. Now, senders must also have a good reputation in addition to the low complaint rates. Good reputation is a measure of user engagement with a particular sender.
This change only reinforces what I and many other delivery experts have been saying: The secret to good delivery is to send mail recipients want. ISPs are making delivery decisions based on those measurements. Send mail that recipients want, and there are few delivery problems.
For a long time good delivery was tied closely to complaint rates, so senders focused on complaints. Spammers focused on complaints too, thus managing to actually get some of their spam delivered. ISPs noticed and started looking at other ways to distinguish wanted mail from spam. One of the better ways to separate spam from wanted mail is to look at user engagement. And the ISPs are measuring engagement and using that measurement as part of their decision making process. Send so much mail users don’t read it, and your reputation goes down followed by your delivery rates.

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Rescuing reputation

One of the more challenging things I do is work with companies who have poor reputations that they’re trying to repair. These companies have been getting by with poor practices for a while, but finally the daily delivery falls below their pain threshold and they decide they need to fix things.
That’s when they call me in, usually asking me if I can go to the ISPs and tell the ISPs that they’re not spammers, they’re doing everything right and will the ISP please stop unfairly blocking them. Usually I will agree to talk to the ISPs, if fixing the underlying problems doesn’t improve their delivery on its own. But before we can talk to the ISPs, we have to try to fix things and at least have some visible changes in behavior to take to them. Once they have externally visible changes, then we can ask the ISPs for a little slack.
With these clients there isn’t just one thing they’ve done to create their bad reputation. Often nothing they’re doing is really evil, it’s just a combination of sorta-bad practices that makes their overall reputation really bad. The struggle is fixing the reputation requires more than one change and no single change is going to necessarily make an immediate improvement on their reputation.
This is a struggle for the customer, because they have to start thinking about email differently. Things have to be done differently from how they’ve always been done. This is a struggle for me because I can’t guarantee if they do this one thing that it will have improved delivery. I can’t guarantee that any one thing will fix their delivery, because ISPs measure and weight dozens of things as part of their delivery making decisions. But what I can guarantee is that if they make the small improvements I recommend then their overall reputation and delivery will improve.
What small improvement have you made today?

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I need IP addresses for reputation

Number one of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly.

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