Email fingerprinting

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about what I mean by email fingerprinting. It means that I’m able to tell these 4 emails were all sent by the same entity. The domains are (mostly) different, the To: addresses are different, but I get hundreds of these emails a day.

Image of one email advertising email marketing

Image of 2nd email advertising nursing school
Image of email advertising letters to Santa
Email advertising business cash advance

Different domains, different products, different to: addresses, different sending IPs. But clearly the same sender for all of them. The domains rotate every few hours, so I get a set from the same domain. Sometimes they are reused. The domain “wayusednone.com” was used for 17 mails on April 5, 2011, 4 emails on August 23, 2011 and 28 mails on December 1.
It’s all spam. I never signed up to receive offers from this mailer. And ISPs are as good as identifying patterns in sending as I am. This spammer knows that, hence the large amounts of text hidden inside the emails trying to fool the filters.
Fingerprinting is a way of identifying that the above four emails (and their 10s of thousands of friends) are all from the same entity and are all spam. The ISPs don’t need to rely on the domains or the links in the emails. There doesn’t need to be any consistency in the content of the mail, the structure is enough to let filters know it’s all spam.

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Poor delivery can't be fixed with technical perfection

There are a number of different things delivery experts can do help senders improve their own delivery. Yes, I said it: senders are responsible for their delivery. ESPs, delivery consultants and deliverability experts can’t fix delivery for senders, they can only advise.
In my own work with clients, I usually start with making sure all the technical issues are correct. As almost all spam filtering is score based, and the minor scores given to things like broken authentication and header issues and formatting issues can make the difference between an email that lands in the inbox and one that doesn’t get delivered.
I don’t think I’m alone in this approach, as many of my clients come to me for help with their technical settings. In some cases, though, fixing the technical problems doesn’t fix the delivery issues. No matter how much my clients tweak their settings and attempt to avoid spamfilters by avoiding FREE!! in the subject line, or changing the background, they still can’t get mail in the inbox.
Why not? Because they’re sending mail that the recipients don’t really want, for whatever reason. There are so many ways a sender can collect an email address without actually collecting consent to send mail to that recipient. Many of the “list building” strategies mentioned by a number of experts involve getting a fig leaf of permission from recipients without actually having the recipient agree to receive mail.
Is there really any difference in permission between purchasing a list of “qualified leads” and automatically adding anyone who makes a purchase at a website to marketing lists? From the recipient’s perspective they’re still getting mail they don’t want, and all the technical perfection in the world can’t overcome the negative reputation associated with spamming.
The secret to inbox delivery: don’t send mail that looks like spam. That includes not sending mail to people who have not expressly consented to receive mail.

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