Email marketing ulcers for the holiday

I’ve mentioned here before that I can usually tell when the big ISPs are making changes to their spam filtering as that ISP dominates my discussions with current and potential clients and many discussions on delivery mailing lists.
The last two weeks the culprit has been Yahoo. They seem to be making a lot of changes to their filtering schemes right at the busiest email marketing time of the year. Senders are increasing their volume trying to extract that last little bit of cash out of holiday shoppers, but they’re seeing unpredictable delivery results. What worked to get mail into the inbox a month ago isn’t working, or isn’t working as well, now.
Some of this could be holiday volume related. Many marketers have drastically increased their mail volume over the last few weeks. But I don’t think the whole issue is simply that there is more email marketing flowing into our mailboxes.
As I’ve been talking with folks, I have started to see a pattern and have some ideas of what may be happening. It seems a lot of the issue revolves around bulk foldering. Getting mail accepted by the MXs seems to be no different than it has been. The change seems to be based on the reputation of the URLs and domains in the email.
Have a domain with a poor reputation? Bulk. Have a URL seen in mail people aren’t interested in? Bulk. Have a URL pointing to a website with problematic content? Bulk.
In the past IPs that were whitelisted or had very good reputations could improve delivery of email with neutral or even borderline poor reputations. It seems that is no longer an effect senders can rely on. It may even be that Yahoo, and other ISPs, are going to start splitting IP reputation from content reputation. IP reputation is critical for getting mail in the door, and without a good IP reputation you’ll see slow delivery. But once the mail has been accepted, there’s a whole other level of filtering, most of it on the content and generally unaffected by the IP reputation.
I don’t think the changes are going to go away any time soon. I think they may be refined, but I do think that reputation on email content (particularly domains and URLs and target IP addresses) is going to play a bigger and bigger role in email delivery.
What, specifically, is going to happen at Yahoo? Only they can tell you and I’m not sure I have enough of a feel for the pattern to speculate about the future. I do think that it’s going to take a few weeks for things to settle down and be consistent enough that we can start to poke the black box and map how it works.

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The coming changes

Yesterday I talked about how I’m hearing warnings of a coming paradigm shift in the email industry. While these changes will affect all sender, ESPs in particular are going to need to change how they interact with both ISPs and their customers.
Currently, ESPs are able to act as “routine conveyers.” The traffic going across their network is generated by their customers and the ESP only handles technical issues. Responsible ESPs do enforce standards on their customers and expect mailings to meet certain targets. They monitor complaints and unknown users, they monitor blocks and reputation. If customers get out of line, then the ESP steps in and forces their customer to improve their practices. If the customer refuses, then the ESP disconnects them.
Currently standards for email are mostly dictated by the ISPs. Many ESPs take the stance that if any mail that is not blocked by the ISPs then it is acceptable. But just because a certain customer isn’t blocked doesn’t mean they’re sending mail that is wanted by the recipients.
It seems this reactive approach to customer policing may no longer be enough. In fact, one of the large spam filter providers has recently offered their customers the ability to block mail from all ESPs with a single click. This may become a more common response if the ESPs don’t start proactively policing their networks.
Why is this happening? ISPs and filtering companies are seeing increasing percentages of spam coming out of ESP netspace. Current processes for policing customers are extremely reactive and there are many ESPs that are allowing their customers to send measurable percentages of spam. This situation is untenable for the filtering companies or the ISPs and they’re sending out warnings that the ESPs need to stop letting so much spam leave their networks.
Unsurprisingly, there are many members of the ESP community that don’t like this and think the ISPs are overreacting and being overly mean. They do not think the ISPs or filtering companies should be blocking all an ESPs customers just because some of the customers are sending unwanted mail. Paraphrased, some of the things I’ve heard include:

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Preferences pages

As often as I talk about how badly companies send mail, I think it’s always a good idea to highlight when I find companies doing good things.
Today’s example of a company making me happy is Sur la Table. I’ve been on their mailing list for quite a while and do enjoy the offers and information they send. With the advent of the holiday cooking season, though, they’ve massively increased their volume. 21 emails in September, 25 emails in October and 37 emails in the month of November.

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Why do ISPs do that?

One of the most common things I hear is “but why does the ISP do it that way?” The generic answer for that question is: because it works for them and meets their needs. Anyone designing a mail system has to implement some sort of spam filtering and will have to accept the potential for lost mail. Even the those recipients who runs no software filtering may lose mail. Their spamfilter is the delete key and sometimes they’ll delete a real mail.
Every mailserver admin, whether managing a MTA for a corporation, an ISP or themselves inevitably looks at the question of false positives and false negatives. Some are more sensitive to false negatives and would rather block real mail than have to wade through a mailbox full of spam. Others are more sensitive to false positives and would rather deal with unfiltered spam than risk losing mail.
At the ISPs, many of these decisions aren’t made by one person, but the decisions are driven by the business philosophy, requirements and technology. The different consumer ISPs have different philosophies and these show in their spamfiltering.
Gmail, for instance, has a lot of faith in their ability to sort, classify and rank text. This is, after all, what Google does. Therefore, they accept most of the email delivered to Gmail users and then sort after the fact. This fits their technology, their available resources and their business philosophy. They leave as much filtering at the enduser level as they can.
Yahoo, on the other hand, chooses to filter mail at the MTA. While their spamfoldering algorithms are good, they don’t want to waste CPU and filtering effort on mail that they think may be spam. So, they choose to block heavily at the edge, going so far as to rate limit senders that they don’t know about the mail. Endusers are protected from malicious mail and senders have the ability to retry mail until it is accepted.
The same types of entries could be written about Hotmail or AOL. They could even be written about the various spam filter vendors and blocklists. Every company has their own way of doing things and their way reflects their underlying business philosophy.

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