Email problems are costly

Last week Zulily released their quarterly earnings. Their earnings’ report was disappointing, resulting in a drop in their stock prices. The chairman of the company told reporters on a conference call that part of the reason for the drop in earnings were due to deliverability problems “at a large ISP.”

Zulily ran into problems with a large email provider — issues which resulted in the retailer being unable to send out its daily email blasts to some customers.
No emails, no sales.

As a result of the weak earnings, Zulily stock dropped nearly 20%.
The reports don’t say specifics about what happened or which ISP was the problem. Given what I know about the makeup of consumer lists, I’d have to say the issue was either at Yahoo or Gmail. Those two providers together make up over 50% of most consumer lists. Both companies have complex filtering processes that do not rely solely on IP address reputation, but look at content and a host of other factors.
Deliverability is critical for companies these days and even a short period of delivery problems can have serious financial implications.

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Not lazy, just annoyed

I don’t usually send in spam reports, but I submitted a couple in the last few weeks. Somehow an address of mine is on a bunch of rave / club lists in London. You want to know what is happening at London clubs this week? It’s all there in my spam folder.
This mail finally hit my annoyance threshold, so I’ve been submitting reports and complaints to the senders the last few weeks. The mail, with full headers, goes with an explanation that the address that received it was harvested off a website more than 5 years ago and never opted in to receive any mail.
One of the ISPs I sent the report to has a web form where the complainant and the customer can see the report and both can comment on it. The customer replied to my complaint on it.

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Abuse it and lose it

Last week I blogged about the changes at ISPs that make “ISP Relations” harder for many senders. But it’s not just ISPs that are making it a little more difficult to get answers to questions, some spam filtering companies are pulling back on offering support to senders.
For instance, Cloudmark sent out an email to some ESPs late last week informing them that Cloudmark was changing their sender support policies. It’s not that they’re overwhelmed with delisting requests, but rather that many ESPs are asking for specific data about why the mail was blocked. In December, Spamcop informed some ESPs that they would stop providing data to those ESPs about specific blocks and spam trap hits.
These decisions make it harder for ESPs to identify specific customers and lists causing them to get blocked. But I understand why the filtering companies have had to take such a radical step.
Support for senders by filtering companies is a side issue. Their customers are the users of the filtering service and support teams are there to help paying customers. Many of the folks at the filtering companies are good people, though, and they’re willing to help blocked senders and ESPs to figure out the problem.
For them, providing information that helps a company clean up is a win. If an ESP has a spamming customer and the information from the filtering company is helping the ESP force the customer to stop spamming that’s a win and that’s why the filtering companies started providing that data to ESPs.
Unfortunately, there are people who take advantage of the filtering companies. I have dozens of stories about how people are taking advantage of the filtering companies. I won’t share specifics, but the summary is that some people and ESPs ask for the same data over and over and over again. The filtering company rep, in an effort to be helpful and improve the overall email ecosystem, answers their questions and sends the data. In some cases, the ESP acts on the data, the mail stream improves and everyone is happy (except maybe the spammer). In other cases, though, the filtering company sees no change in the mail stream. All the filtering company person gets is yet another request for the same data they sent yesterday.
Repetition is tedious. Repetition is frustrating. Repetition is disheartening. Repetition is annoying.
What we’re seeing from both Spamcop and Cloudmark is the logical result from their reps being tired of dealing with ESPs that aren’t visibly fixing their customer spam problems. Both companies are sending some ESPs to the back of the line when it comes to handling information requests, whether or not those ESPs have actually been part of the problem previously.
The Cloudmark letter makes it clear what they’re frustrated about.

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Working as intended

There’s a certain type of sender that thinks every ISP block or email delivered to the bulk folder is a false positive. They’re so sure that the filters aren’t actually supposed to catch their mail that they’ll spend any amount of money and do every possible thing to get their mail to the inbox.
The problem for these senders, though, is that their mail is exactly the type of mail filters are designed to catch. They’re sending mail without recipient permission. I’m not talking about the lists that get a few typos or problem addresses on them. I’m talking about senders that buy and trade mailing lists. I’m talking about senders that don’t believe they have to have permission to send mail.
This mail getting filtered is a sign that the filters are working as intended. They’re keeping the unsolicited email out.
A lot of us take for granted that all commercial mail, at least that isn’t selling fake watches or herbal viagra, is always sent with permission. But there’s an awful lot of mail out there that doesn’t even have a minor fig leaf of permission. Filters stop that mail. And senders have very little recourse when they do.

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