IP reputation and email delivery

IP reputation is a measure of how much wanted mail a particular IP address sends.  This wanted mail is measured as a portion of the total email sent from that IP. Initially IP reputation was really the be all and end all of reputation, there was no real good way to authenticate a domain or a from address. Many ISPs built complex IP reputation models to evaluate mail based on the IP that sent the mail.
These IP reputation models were the best we had, but there were a lot of ways for spammers to game the system. Some spammers would create lots of accounts at ISPs and use them to open and interact with mail. Other spammers would trickle their mail out over hundreds or thousands of IPs in the hopes of diluting the badness enough to get to the inbox. Through it all they kept trying to get mail out through reputable ESPs, either by posing as legitimate customers or compromising servers.
These things worked for a while, but the ISPs started looking harder at the recipient pool in order to figure out if the interactions were real or not. They started looking at the total amount of identical mail coming from multiple IP addresses. The ISPs couldn’t rely on IP reputation so they started to dig down and get into content based filtering.
As the ISPs got better at identifying content and filtering on factors other than source IP, the importance of the IP address on inbox delivery changed. No longer was it good enough to have a high reputation IP sending mail.
These days your IP reputation dictates how fast you can send mail to a particular ISP. But a high reputation IP isn’t sufficient to get all the mail in the inbox. It’s really content that drives the inbox / bulk folder decisions these days.
 
Generally IPs that the ISP has not seen email traffic from before start out with a slight negative reputation. This is because most new IPs are actually infected machines. The negative reputation translates to rate limiting. The rate limiting minimizes people getting spam while the ISP works out if this is a real sender or a spammer.
Some ISPs put mail in the inbox and bulk foldering during the whitelisting process. In this case what they’re doing is seeing if your recipients care enough about your mail to look for it in the bulk folder. If they do, and they mark the mail as “not spam” then this feeds back to the sender reputation and the IP reputation.
If you’re seeing a lot of bulk foldering of mail, it’s unlikely there’s anything IP reputation based to do. Instead of worrying about IP reputation, focus instead on the content of the mail and see what you may need to do to improve the reputation of the domains and URLs (or landing pages) in the emails.

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Spam is not a moral judgement

Mention an email is spam to some senders and watch them dance around trying to explain all the ways they aren’t spammers. At some point, calling an email spam seems to have gone from a statement of fact into some sort of moral judgement on the sender. But calling an email spam is not a moral judgement. It’s just a statement of what a particular recipient thinks of an email.
There are lots of reasons mail can be blocked and not all those reasons are spam related. Sometimes it’s a policy based rejection. Mailbox providers publishing a DMARC record with a reject policy caused a lot of mail to bounce, but none of that was because that user (or that mailing list) was sending spam. Most cable companies prohibit customers from running mail servers on their cable connection and mail from those companies is widely rejected, but that doesn’t mean the mail is spam.
Sometimes a block is because some of the mail is being sent to people who didn’t ask for it or are complaining about it. This doesn’t make the sender a bad person. It doesn’t make the sending company bad. It just means that there is some issue with a part of the marketing program that need to be addressed.
The biggest problem I see is some senders get so invested in convincing receivers, delivery experts and filtering companies that they’re not spammers, that they miss actually fixing the problem. They are so worried that someone might think they’re spammers, they don’t actually listen to what’s being said by the blocking organization, or by their ISP or by their ESP.
Calling email spam isn’t a moral judgement. But, if too many people call a particular email spam, it’s going to be challenging to get that mail to the inbox. Instead of arguing with those people, and the filters that listen to them, a better use of time and energy is fixing the reasons people aren’t liking your email.

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April: The month in email

April was a big month of changes in the email world, and here at Word to the Wise as we launched our new site, blog and logo.
DMARC
The big story this month has been DMARC, which started with a policy change Yahoo made on April 4 updating their DMARC policy from “report” to “reject”. We began our coverage with a brief DMARC primer to explain the basics around these policy statements and why senders are moving in this direction. We shared some example bounces due to Yahoo’s p=reject, and talked about how to fix discussion lists to work with the new Yahoo policy. We gathered some pointers to other articles worth reading on the Yahoo DMARC situation, and suggested some options for dealing with DMARC for mail intermediaries. Yahoo issued a statement about this on April 11th, explaining that it had been highly effective in reducing spoofed email. We also noted a great writeup on the situation from Christine at ReturnPath. On April 22nd, AOL also announced a DMARC p=reject record.  We talked a bit about who might be next (Gmail?) and discussed how Comcast chose to implement DMARC policies, using p=reject not for user email, but only for the domains they use to communicate directly with customers. We expect to see more discussion and policy changes over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.
Spamtraps
We wrote three posts in our continuing discussion about spamtraps. The first was in response to a webinar from the DMA and EEC, where we talked about how different kinds of traps are used in different ways, and, again, how spamtraps are just a symptom of a larger problem. Following that, we wrote more about some ongoing debate on traps as we continued to point out that each trap represents a lost opportunity for marketers to connect with customers, which is really where we hope email program managers will focus. And finally, we tried to put some myths about typo traps to rest. As I mentioned in that last post, I feel like I’m repeating myself over and over again, but I want to make sure that people get good information about how these tools are used and misused.
Security
We started the month by saying “Security has to become a bigger priority for companies” and indeed, the internet continued to see security breaches in April, including the very serious Heartbleed vulnerability in SSL. In the email world, AOL experienced a compromise, which contributed to some of the DMARC policy changes we discussed above. In a followup post, we talked about how these breaches appear to be escalating. Again, we expect to hear more about this in the next weeks and months.
Best Practices
Ending on a positive note, we had a few posts about best practices and some email basics. We started with a pointer to Al Iverson’s post on masking whois info and why not to do it. Steve wrote up a comprehensive post with everything you ever wanted to know about the From header and RFC5322. I talked about how companies ignore opt-outs, and why they shouldn’t. I shared a really good example of a third-party email message, and also talked about message volume. And finally, we talked about how and why we warm up IP addresses.
Let us know if there’s anything you’d like to hear more about in May!

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Thoughts on Gmail and the inbox

Over the last few months more and more marketers are finding their primary delivery challenge is the Gmail inbox. I’ve been thinking about why Gmail might be such a challenge for marketers. Certainly I have gotten a lot of calls from people struggling to figure out how to get into the Gmail inbox. I’ve also seen aggressive domain based filtering from Gmail, where any mention of a particular domain results in mail going to the bulk folder.
It’s one of those things that’s a challenge, because in most of these cases there isn’t one cause for bulk foldering. Instead there’s a whole host of things that are individually very small but taken together convince Gmail that the mail doesn’t need to be in the inbox.
A pattern that I’m starting to see is that Gmail is taking a more holistic look at all the mail from a sender. If the mail is connected to an organization, all that mail is measured as part of their delivery decision making. This is hurting some ESPs and bulk senders. I’ve had multiple ESPs contact me in the last 6 months looking for help because all their customer emails are going to bulk folder.
Gmail’s filtering is extremely aggressive. From my perspective it always has been. I did get an invite for a Gmail account way back in the day. I moved a couple mailing lists over to that account to test it with some volume and discussion lists. I gave up not long after because no matter what I did I couldn’t get gmail to put all the mail from that list into the tag I had set up for it. Inevitably some mail from some certain people would end up in my spam folder.
Gmail has gotten better, now they will let you override their filters but give you a big warning that the message would have been delivered to spam otherwise.
Gmail_NotSpam
What are mailers to do? Right now I don’t have a good answer. Sending mail people want is still good advice for individual senders. But I am not sure what can be done about this ESP wide filtering that I’m starting to see. It’s possible Gmail is monitoring all the mail from a particular sender or ESP and applying a “source network” score. Networks letting customers send mail Gmail doesn’t like (such as affiliate mail or payday mail, things they mentioned specifically at M3AAWG) are having all their customers affected.
I suspect this means that ESPs seeing problems across their customer base are going to have to work harder to police their customers and remove problematic mail streams completely. Hopefully, ESPs that can get on the Gmail FBL can identify the problem customers faster before those customers tank mail for all their senders.

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