The challenge of Gmail

A lot of my sales inquiries recently are about getting good inbox delivery at Gmail. I’ve mentioned before, I can usually tell when an ISP changes things because they suddenly become the subject of a great many phone calls.
In this case, Gmail seems to have turned up their engagement filters and is sending a lot more mail to the bulk folder. I have also noticed other people are blogging about Gmail delivery problems. Al eventually determined that it was mailings sent from other IPs that were degrading the delivery of his customer’s emails.
Gmail, more than the other major ISPs, seems to not be weighting IP reputation very heavily these days. They’re looking at domain reputation and they’re using all mentions of a domain in that reputation. A lot of senders, some of them spammers, segregate their email streams (acquisition, marketing, transactional) across IP addresses in order to stop poorly performing mails from harming delivery of other emails they’re sending. But Gmail’s current filtering scheme seems designed to focus on domain reputation and minimize the impact of IP reputation.
This is making the Gmail inbox tough to reach for a lot of mailers these days. Even in cases where the mailer isn’t hiring affiliates or actively partitioning mail, if a domain is seen frequently in spam then delivery for that whole domain is hurting. Signing with DKIM and publishing a DMARC record may help. But the reality right now is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet into the Gmail inbox.

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DKIM and Gmail

After they were a a little embarrassed by their own DKIM keys being poorly managed a few months ago, Google seem to have been going through their inbound DKIM handling and tightening up on their validation so that badly signed mail that really shouldn’t be treated as DKIM signed, won’t be treated as signed by Gmail.
This is a good thing, especially as things like DMARC start to be layered on top of DKIM, but it does mean that you really need to check your signing configuration and make sure you’re not doing anything silly.

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Mail.app outs lazy marketers

The default mail client on OS X is Mail.app. In recent versions it does it’s best to bundle threads of email together to make it easier for you to keep track of conversations via email – they appear in the list of messages as a single entry with a badge showing the number of messages in that thread. There are standard ways to track mail threads, but they sometimes get broken by mailing list software, so Mail.app also bundles together messages with an identical sender and Subject line.
That has an unexpected side effect, when it comes to email marketing.

That little “4” badge on the right tells me that this is the fourth time Marriott have sent me this same email (over a period of several months) and there’s really no need for me to open it and read it again.

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Increasing engagement for delivery?

I’ve talked a lot about engagement here over the years and how increasing engagement can increase inbox delivery.
But does driving engagement always improve delivery?

Take LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn has started to pop-up a link when users log in. This popup suggests that the user endorse a connection for a particular skill. When the user clicks on the popup, an email is sent to the connection. The endorsement encourages the recipient to visit the LinkedIn website and review endorsements. Once the user is on the site, they receive a popup asking for endorsement of a connection. Drives engagement both on the website and with email. Win for everyone, right?
I get lots of these endorsements, but I’ve had a few that have made me wonder what’s really going on. Are these people really endorsing my skills? If they are then why am I getting endorsements from people I’ve not seen in 15 years and why are some of the endorsed skills things I can’t do?
This morning I asked one of my connections if he really did endorse me for my abilities in Cloud Computing. His response was enlightening.

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