Delivery consulting: it's all about the credibility

A few months ago I found a great blog post written by an ER doctor about how to convince other doctors to come in and deal with a patient in the middle of the night. There are quite  few similarities between his advice and the advice I would give delivery experts, ISP relations folks and ESP representatives when dealing with ISPs and spam filtering companies.

Credibility is the sole currency you have in this relationship. Hoard it carefully and spend it wisely.

Delivery is not a matter of life and death, so failing to get what I need from an ISP does not result in anyone dying. But over the long term, I am much more likely to get contacts, help and information if I demonstrate that I am an ally and that I can be trusted to work with them to get their users email that they want while stopping email they don’t want.
Here’s my not-so-patented recipe for success in getting information from ISPs.

  1. Never contact without first knowing exactly what it is that you want. Are you looking for information? Are you looking to get a block lifted? Do you need help translating a cryptic bounce message? Whatever it is, be clear about what you want. If you’re opening a ticket, give them all the information they ask for. If they have a text box where you can give more details do so, but be concise and clear.
  2. Never lie or shade the truth. The ISP reps have heard it all before, they know that a significant portion of people with “ISP relations” in their job title will lie, cheat or run their grandmother over on the street if it will get their mail delivered better. This is the reputation (right or wrong) of our industry. You can overcome this, if you always shoot straight. Don’t promise anything your customer (or client) can’t deliver.
  3. Have your data together. Have all the data you will need to deal with before opening a ticket or escalating. This means you need to know the dates the mail was sent, the IP it was sent from, what the bounce message was if it was rejected, how long this has been happening, what URLs are in the message, what the from: line of the message is. Being able to provide all the data that the woman on the other end needs to help you is going to make the process so much easier for everyone.
  4. Be reasonable. You know how over worked and behind you are? How many clients and customers you have screaming at you for a response? The ISP folks are at least that behind, and are generally not making near as much money as you are. Don’t open a ticket, then send an email to the guy you met at that conference and then open an IM conversation with him. Give them a chance to get back to you before escalating
  5. Be pleasant. Social lubrication is a good thing, keep it light. Again, most of us who do this are incredibly busy. “Hi, How are you, do you have a minute” is a great opening line. “Hey, what’s the new law in CA say?” is less so.  If they are open to a bit of chatter then that’s great, if they say they are busy ask your question and get out.
  6. SAY THANK YOU. This is especially true when you’re escalating something and using a personal contact. Thank them for helping you. It’s even nice to send a (very brief) followup once your customer or client has fixed whatever the problem was. “Thanks for your help the other day. Your information helped me to convince client to do X, and now they are getting good inbox delivery.”

Consistency is key to establishing a personal reputation that you are someone who is both pleasant to deal with, trustworthy and not going to waste their time.

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This is why the ISPs throw up their hands at senders

I recently saw a question from an ESP rep asking if anyone had a personal contact at a particular ISP. The problem was that they had a rejection from the ISP saying: 571 5.7.1 too many recipients this session. The ESP was looking for someone at the ISP in order to ask what the problem was.
This is exactly the kind of behaviour that drives ISPs bonkers about senders. The ISP has sent a perfectly understandable rejection: “5.7.1: too many recipients this session.” And instead of spending some time and energy on the sender side troubleshooting, instead of spending some of their own money to work out what’s going on, they fall back on asking the ISPs to explain what they should do differently.
What, exactly, should you do differently? Stop sending so many recipients in a single session. This is not rocket science. The ISP tells you exactly what you need to do differently, and your first reaction is to attempt to mail postmaster@ the ISP and then, when that bounces, your next step is to look for a personal contact?
No. No. No.
Look, connections and addresses per connections is one of the absolute easiest things to troubleshoot. Fire up a shell, telnet to port 25 on the recipient server, and do a hand SMTP session, count the number of receipts. Sure, in some corporate situations it can be a PITA to do, sometimes you’re going to need to get it done from a particular IP which may be an interface on an appliance and doesn’t have telnet or whatever. But, y’know what? That Is Your Job.  If your company isn’t able to do it, well, please tell me so I can stop recommending that as an ESP. Companies have to be able to test and troubleshoot their own networks.
Senders have been begging ISPs for years “just tell us what you want and we’ll bother you less.” In this case the ISP was extremely clear about what they want: they want fewer recipients per connection. But the ESP delivery person is still looking for a contact so they can talk to the ISP to understand it better.
This is why the ISPs get so annoyed with senders. They’re tired of having to do the sender’s job.

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Monitoring Email Deliverability

I did an interview with Direct Mag recently about what I recommend mailers do to monitor email deliverability.

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Delivery problems are not all spam related

Not every delivery failure is due to poor reputation or spam. Sometimes ISPs just have problems on their mailservers and so mail doesn’t get through. It’s often hard for delivery experts (and their bosses and their customers and their clients) to watch email delays or rejections without being able to do anything about it.
Sometimes, though, there is nothing to do. The rejections are because something broke at the ISP and they have to sort through it. Just this week there’s been a lot of twitter traffic about problems at a major cable company. They are rate limiting senders with very good reputations. They have admitted there is a problem, but they don’t have a fix or an ETA. From what I’ve heard it they’re working with their hardware vendor to fix the problem.
Hardware breaks and backhoes eat fiber. Yes, ISPs should (and all of the large ones do) have backups and redundancies. But those backups and redundancies can’t always handle the firehose worth of mail coming to the ISPs. As a result, the ISPs start rejecting some percentage of mail from everyone. Yahoo even has a specific error message to distinguish between “we’re blocking just you” from “we’re shedding load and temp failing everyone.”

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