More than just getting past the filters

I’ve been feeling a little philosophical lately. My thoughts are meandering a lot around the whys and the deeper issues surrounding stuff, including email. It means I’m a bit more distracted and less focused than usual. And more prone to pose questions than usual. This was part of the introspection that led me to write the motivating people post last week. I’m trying to figure out how to motivate volunteers in two different realms. And there’s always the question of how do I present a solution to clients in a way that motivates them to take my advice. Sure, I get paid either way, but I really like it when clients take my advice and see success.
There are other places this mental meandering is taking me.
I’m currently working on a project for a client. This particular client is struggling to get mail delivered to a very mobile business audience. In the target field, people change jobs regularly and email addresses can change multiple times a year. One of the things I’m working on for them is how to get email to the right people, that is the people who opted in, when their addresses change so frequently.
This is delivery consulting, but this project really brings home how much more there is to delivery than avoiding filters. Filters are the least of this client’s problem. The real problem is the mobility of their audience. As I was thinking about how to address this issue of mobility, I realized that my job as a delivery expert has gone well beyond telling people how to get their mail past filters.
My job is much more about helping people succeed at what it is that they’re trying to do with email. How can email work for you and for your target audience?
Looking at the broader picture means I’m less likely to focus on the minutia of “spam words” and subject lines and best time of day to send. Sure, there are always tweaks to make in an email. There are always things to test. There are always changes to try. But the effect of those changes is not near as great as actually sending mail that meets the needs of the audience.
Often clients come to me so overwhelmed in the details they forget the bigger picture. I help them find that picture again. My job is much more than getting through the filters, it’s about finding success for clients.

Related Posts

Email filters

What makes the best email filter? There isn’t really a single answer to that question. Different people and different organizations have different tolerances for how false positives versus false negatives. For instance, we’re quite sensitive to false positives here, so we run extremely conservative filtering and don’t block very much at the MTA level. Other people I know are very sensitive to false negatives and run more aggressive filtering and block quite a bit of mail at the MTA level.
For the major ISPs, the people who plan, approve, design and monitor the filters usually want to maximize customer happiness. They want to deliver as much real mail as possible while blocking as much bad mail. Blocking real mail and letting through bad mail both result in unhappy customers and increase the ISP’s costs, either through customer churn or through support calls. And this is a process, filters are not static. ISPs roll out new filters all the time, sometimes they are an improvement and sometimes they’re not. When they’re not, they’re pulled out of production. This works both for positive filters like Return Path and negative filters like blocklists.
Then there is mail filtering that doesn’t have to do with spam. Business filters, for instance, often block non-business mail. Permission of the recipient often isn’t even a factor. Companies don’t often go out of their way to block personal mail, but if personal mail gets blocked (say the vacation plane ticket or the amazon receipt) they don’t often unblock it. But when you think about why a business provides email, it makes perfect sense. The business provides email to further its own business goals. Some personal usage is usually OK, but if someone notices and blocks personal email then it’s unlikely the business will unblock it, even if the employee opted in.
In the case of email filters, the free market does work. Different ISPs filter mail differently. Some people love Gmail’s filters. Other people think Hotmail has the best filtering. There are different standards for filtering, and that makes email stronger and more robust. Consumers have choices in their mail provider and spamfiltering.

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Filters and windmills

A colleague of mine was dealing with a client who is experiencing some difficulty delivering to the bulk folder. Said client spent much of a one hour phone call repeating “This is not how a free society works!!”
After the call my colleague commented, “I refuse to get ranty about filter systems.”
I know that filters, and the people who write and maintain them, are a frequent scapegoat for senders. The filters are always the problem, not anything the senders do.
Now, I’ll be the last person who will claim spam filters are perfect, they’re not. Filters sometimes do unexpected things, sometimes they do boneheaded things, sometimes they are broken.
We can’t forget, though, that filters perform a vital role in protecting users from malicious emails. Phishing emails, scams, fake products, viruses are a constant threat. Many end users don’t need to worry about this because filters are so good. But an unfiltered account can get thousands of scams and spams a day (ask me how I know).
Most of us in the delivery space can tell when a filter is working as intended and when there’s an underlying problem. And when the filter is working as intended there’s not a lot of use complaining about them. Ranting about filtering systems often delays a resolution. Senders that focus on what they can control tend to have more success reaching the inbox than those senders that focus on ranting about filtering systems.
Tilting at windmills doesn’t get the mail through.

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Spamhaus rising?

Ken has a good article talking about how many ESPs have tightened their standards recently and are really hounding their customers to stop sending mail recipients don’t want and don’t like. Ken credits much of this change to Spamhaus and their new tools.

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