Facebook Postmaster page

There’s still quite a bit of concern and worry about how the Facebook messaging platform is going to affect marketing. One thing that may help is the Facebook postmaster page. There’s all sorts of good information on those pages, reflecting the years of experience that their messaging team has in running large platforms.
Some points worth mentioning.

  • Facebook is giving detailed response codes allowing senders to identify technical problems and policy problems. They’re also giving time frames for how long policy problems might last.
  • Facebook is requiring some sort of domain authentication to send mail. While they are not outright rejecting unauthenticated mail, they are reserving the right to deliver unauthenticated mail slower than authenticated mail.
  • Facebook is not promoting the use of their messaging system for bulk mail. Based on Zuc’s announcement, this shouldn’t come to a surprise to anyone. This also means they’re not providing any resolution services for delivery problems. They’re also not providing a feedback loop.
  • Facebook is not accepting mail from dynamic IP addresses, and are using the PBL as one part of that screening.

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Guide to resolving ISP issues

I often get a chuckle out of watching some people, who are normally on the blocking end of the delivery equation, struggle through their own blocking issues. A recent situation came up on a mailing list where someone who has very vehement opinions about how to approach her particular blocklist for delisting and that the lists policies are immutable. The company she works for is having some delivery issues and she’s looking for a contact to resolve the issues.
While digging through my blog posts to see if there was any help I could provide, I realized I don’t have a guide to resolving blocking issues at ISPs. Much of the troubleshooting can be done without ever contacting the ISPs or the blocklists.
Identify the issue.
There are a number of techniques that ISPs use to protect their users from malicious or problematic mail, from rate-liming incoming mail, putting mail in the bulk folder, or blocking specific IP addresses. Step one to resolving any delivery problem is to identify what is happening to the mail. In order to resolve the issue, you have to know what the issue is.
All too often, the description of a delivery problem is: My mail isn’t getting delivered. But that isn’t very clear as to what the actual problem is. Are you being temp failed? Is mail being blocked? Is mail going to the bulk folder? Is this something affecting just you or is it a widespread problem?
Troubleshoot your side.
Collect as much data about the problem as you can. Dig through logs and get copies of any rejection messages. Follow any URLs that are present in the bounce messages. Try sending a bare bones email to yourself at that ISP with just URLs, is it still blocked? What if you send from a different IP, does the same thing happen?
There is a lot of troubleshooting a sender can do without having to contact an ISP, and the information can lead to resolution that doesn’t involve having to contact the ISP. Also, many current ISP blocks are dynamic, they come up and go down without any human intervention. Those blocks that require contact to get them resolved have clear instructions in the bounce message.
Fix your stuff.
Whether it’s a reputation issue or a minor technical issue, fix the problem on your end. Just moving IP addresses or changing a URL isn’t a sustainable fix. There is a reason mail is being blocked or filtered and if you don’t fix that issue, the blocks are just going to come back. After you do fix your stuff, expect to see changes in a few days or a week. The ISP filters are generally quite responsive to sender improvements so if you’ve fixed the stuff you should see changes pretty quickly. Expect unblocking or filtering to take a little longer than the block was in place.
If you can’t figure out what the problem is, hire a consultant. Here at Word to the Wise we can often quickly identify a problem and provide a path to resolution. Sometimes the problem isn’t even the ISPs, we’ve had multiple cases where our clients were using custom software and their software wasn’t SMTP compliant and we were able to identify the problem and get their mail working again. There are a host of other independent consultants out there that can also help you identify and resolve blocking problems.
Contact the ISPs.
If there is a hard block or after fixing what you think the underlying problem is, you’ll have to contact the ISP. Many ISPs provide self service websites and contact forms to facilitate this process. Generally, though, most issues aren’t going to require contact.

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FBox: The sky isn't falling

Having listened to the Facebook announcement this morning, I am even more convinced that emailpocalypse isn’t happening.
Look, despite the fact that companies like Blue Sky Factory think that this means marketers are NEVER EVER going see the inside of an inbox again this isn’t the end of email marketing.
Yes, Facebook email is a messaging platform that marketers are not going to have direct, unlimited and unfettered access to. I have no problem with this. Unfettered access to a messaging platform has been abused by marketers long enough, that I heartily approve of a platform that gives real control back to the recipient.
With that being said, there are a couple blindingly obvious ways to avoid having to give users control of their own inbox.

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Zombie email: Part 2

In zombie email: part 1 I talked about how email addresses were tightly tied to internet access in the very early years of the internet. We didn’t have to worry about zombie email addresses because when an account was shut down, or ignored for a long time then mail would start bouncing and a sender could stop sending to that account.
There were two major changes to email accounts in the early 2000’s that led to the rise of zombie emails.
People started decoupling their internet access from their email addresses. Free addresses were easy to get and could be checked from everywhere. No longer did they have to dial in to get email, they could access it from outside the office and outside the home. Mobile devices, including the first generation of smart phones and laptops, helped drive people to use email addresses that they could access from any network. The easy access to free mail accounts and the permanence led people to adopt those addresses as their primary address.
When people changed addresses, for whatever reason, they didn’t have to stop paying. There was no way to tell the free ISPs to stop accepting mail for that address. Free mail providers would let addresses linger for months or years after the user had stopped logging in. Sometimes those addresses would fill up and start bouncing email, but they were not often turned off by the ISPs.
The lack of purging of abandoned addresses was the start of dead addresses accumulating on mailing lists. But there weren’t that many addresses in this state, and eventually they would fill up with mail. When they were full the ISP would stop accepting new mail for that account, and the address would bounce off a mailing list.
Everything changed with the entrance of Gmail onto the scene. When Gmail launched in 2004 they were providing a whole GB of storage for email accounts a totally unheard of storage capacity. Within a year they were providing multiple gigabytes of storage. Other freemail systems followed Gmail’s lead and now all free accounts have nearly unlimited storage. Plus, any mail in the spam folder was purged after a few weeks and bulk mail doesn’t count against the users’ storage quota. Now, an abandoned email account will almost never fill up thus senders can’t use over quota bounces to identify abandoned accounts.
Now we’re stuck in a situation where SMTP replies can’t be used to identify that there is no one home inside a particular email account. Senders can’t distinguish between a quiet subscriber and an abandoned address. ISPs, however, can and are using zombie addresses as a measure of a senders reputation.
On Monday we’ll talk about why and how zombie addresses can affect delivery. (Zombie emails: part 3)
Tuesday, we’ll talk about strategies to protect your list from being taken over by zombies. (Zombie Apocalypse)

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