4 things the new outlook ads tell us about email

Microsoft has a new TV ad showing how trivial it is to remove unwanted email from the inbox. Various busy people use the “sweep” and “delete” functions to clean up mail. The commercial even have a segment counting up the hundreds of emails deleted.
This tells me a few things.Images of all my different filters

  1. Email isn’t dead. Major companies are still investing in email products and creating tools that help users organize and manage incoming messages: Outlook.com is the newest mail product from Microsoft, Yahoo is working on their mail client, AOL launched a new product last year, Gmail is still tweaking their client. Email is here to stay.
  2. People use email as more than just communication. “Inbox Zero” is not just for businesses any more, that concept is running over into personal mail, too. People use their inboxes as scheduling tools, todo lists and reminders. I expect to see more things like mailboxapp to help people deal with email as a scheduling device.
  3. People want to be able to deal with messages in bulk in their mailbox. This seems obvious but when mail is sent in bulk, people want to be able to deal with it in bulk. This is the most relevant point for marketers, I think. Send lots of mail, people are going to develop techniques for dealing with that mail. My techniques centers around filters and segregating different mail into different mailboxes, as shown in the screenshot to the right.
  4. People are seeing so much mail in their inbox they can’t always find what they want. The new tools help organize mail better making it easier to find that mail from the best friend or the most recent sales at your favorite store.

I think it’s great that mailbox providers are thinking about how people use mail and how to make the inbox more pleasant and more useable. This is good for recipients, but it’s also good for marketers. Being able to find mail can be a challenge for heavy email users. Better tools for organization means finding those messages is less of a challenge.

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Robust protection under the CDA

Venkat also commented on the Holomaxx v. MS/Y! ruling.

As with blocking or filtering decisions targeted at malware or spyware, complaining that the ISP was improperly filtering bulk email (spam) is likely to fall on unsympathetic ears. It would take a lot for a court to allow a bulk emailer to conduct discovery on the filtering processes and metrics employed by an ISP. (Hence the rulings on a 12b motion, rather than on summary judgment.) Here the court reiterates the “good faith” standard for 230(c)(2) is measured subjectively, not objectively. That puts a heavy burden on plaintiffs to show subjective bad faith.

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Still futile

As I mentioned last Thursday, both Yahoo and Microsoft filed oppositions to Holomaxx’s opposition to dismissal. Let me ‘splain… no, there is too much, let me sum up.
Holomaxx sued both Microsoft and Yahoo to force MS and Yahoo to stop blocking mail from Holomaxx.
The judge dismissed the initial complaint with leave to amend.
Holomaxx filed a first amended complaint.
Microsoft and Yahoo both argued that the first amendment complaint should be dismissed because it wasn’t fixed.
Holomaxx filed a motion in opposition to the motion to dismiss. Their arguments were reasonably simple.

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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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