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Troubleshooting email delivery

Mark Brownlow has a post up explaining how he discovered some problems with delivery at Gmail by digging deeper into his statistics. Mark goes through his thought process including his initial conjecture on what might be causing the problems and then how he looked at the data to see if his supposition fit the data.
I love this post. It is so refreshing to watch someone document how they asked questions, then looked at data to find out the answers. Too many people treat best practices in email delivery as a set of rules that are meant to be broken. Instead of actually asking questions and determining what is best for their market and their recipients they implement best practices.
Following best practices isn’t exactly a bad thing, the reason they’re best is because they’re easy to communicate practices that will not result in bad outcomes. But, they’re not always the ideal practices for a specific situation. Best practices are ones that work across a wide range of senders and situations. Blindly implementing best practices will not always result in the best outcome for each situation.
Mark’s post is a tutorial in the art of looking at email delivery. I think there is a need for more of those kinds of posts, explaining the process from identifying an email problem through to confirming that is actually the problem and then testing potential fixes. I’ll be posting troubleshooting guides here over the next few weeks and months. If you have an issue you think would be an interesting case study drop me an email and we’ll go through it.

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Troubleshooting the simple stuff

I was talking with one of my Barry pals recently and was treated to a rant regarding deliverability experts that can’t manage simple things. We’ve been having an ongoing conversation recently about the utterly stupid and annoying questions some senders ask. Last week, I was ranting about a delivery person asking what “5.7.1. Too many receipts this session” meant. This morning I got an IM.

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Don't wait to address delivery problems

One of the worst ways to deal with blocking issues is to ignore them and hope your mail magically moves from the bulk folder back into the inbox. While this does happen as ISPs and filter companies update their filters, it’s not that common and it’s usually the result of a sender actually cleaning up their sending processes and improving the quality of the mail they send.
Do not ignore blocks. What I generally tell people is that it takes at least as long to repair a bad reputation as it took to get that bad reputation in the first place. If you wait months before actually addressing delivery problems, you’re not going to make a change and have the filters react in hours.
This doesn’t mean that every block is a business crisis. Blocks happen and they do go up and down based on thresholds and automatic monitoring scripts and content. But if a block happens consistently for 4 or 5 days in a row it is time to look at what you’re doing. Don’t just focus on the sidelines and little stuff, either. Look at your marketing program and the mail you’re sending.

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