Politics and Delivery

Last week I posted some deliverability advice for the DNC based on their acquisition of President Obama’s 2012 campaign database. Paul asked a question on that post that I think is worth some attention.

I am fascinated by the ramifications of email deliverability for political donations.
Are there sysadmins at the big ISPs who make human decisions on deliverability issues anymore? The power they have to make one candidate’s mail get delivered over another candidate’s mail is enormous. Paul Rydell

There are a lot of issues inside his questions, all of which deserve some discussion.
The first is who makes deliverability decisions inside ISPs. My experience is that it isn’t really sysadmins who do that. Even in the early days (late 90s) most of the delivery decisions were made by someone other than the sysadmins, at least at the big consumer ISPs. In the early 2000s most blocking decisions were handled by humans, making decisions based on data from their internal tools. As the tools became better, the decisions were handled automatically. By the mid to late 2000s, many systems were handling blocks and bans without a human having to review and allow them.
I don’t believe at most of the consumer ISPs and webmail providers that there is any single person with the authority to block mail. There are multiple people who are permitted to block mail that meets the criteria for blocking. But, those criteria are based on performance, not based on message. I’ve written about this many times before. (The Perils of Politics, Censorship, Email and Politics, They’re not blocking you because they hate you, It really can be your email, More on Truthout, Another perspective on the politico article).
There’s also an implication that one person “a sysadmin” shouldn’t have the ability to make decisions about what traffic is OK and what traffic isn’t. Except that’s exactly how it is. Sysadmins have a lot of access to our private data. Some of them can even read our email. Many sysadmins, particularly those who herd large numbers of machines, are very careful about respecting recipient needs, wants and privacy. I was once working with a friend who was a sysadmin at supernews to try and troubleshoot some USENET problems I was having. He made very sure to get direct permission from me to actually look at my account and log information.
Do I think every sysadmin is a bastion of integrity? Of course not. No group of people is perfect all the time. But I do think those individuals who have the power to block messages “follow the rules” when making blocking decisions. Those rules are written by the ISP management team, and people who block traffic have to answer to their manager (and manager’s manager) when they violate the internal processes and block things for reasons that are not behavior based. Everyone who has the power to block mail has a management chain that enforces behavior based blocking.
Then there’s the complexity of what a sysadmin is and what their job is. I asked Mary, who was a sysadmin at a giant consumer ISP in the late 90s, to talk about her experiences as a sysadmin and blocking issues.
Finally, there’s an implication that ISPs have a responsibility to accept and deliver every piece of email sent to them. It’s been established case law, for almost 20 years now, that ISPs do not have to accept and deliver every piece of mail (Cyberpromo v. AOL). If recipients are complaining about mail, there is no obligation for the ISP to deliver it.
Now, Paul and I have had these discussions before. We’ve worked together to address deliverability challenges for political mailers. Some of that work inspired some of my earlier posts on political mail and blocking. A lot of people really believe that email is a public channel, after all most of the public can use it. But it’s not a public channel. Most of the internet, in fact, is privately owned. The owners have a lot of authority to only allow certain traffic on their networks, and blocking email is in that realm of authority.

Deliverability advice to the DNC
Do system administrators have too much power?

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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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URL reputation and shorteners

A bit of  a throwback post from Steve a few years ago. The problem has gotten a little better as some shortening companies are actually disabling spammed URLs, and blocking URLs with problematic content. I still don’t recommend using a public URL shortener in email messages, though.
Any time you put a URL in mail you send out, you’re sharing the reputation of everyone who uses URLs with that hostname. So if other people send unwanted email that has the same URL in it that can cause your mail to be blocked or sent to the bulk folder.
That has a bunch of implications. If you run an affiliate programme where your affiliates use your URLs then spam sent by your affiliates can cause your (clean, opt-in, transactional) email to be treated as spam. If you send a newsletter with advertisers URLs in it then bad behaviour by other senders with the same advertisers can cause your email to be spam foldered. And, as we discussed yesterday, if spammers use the same URL shortener you do, that can cause your mail to be marked as spam.
Even if the hostname you use for your URLs is unique to you, if it resolves to the same IP address as a URL that’s being used in spam, that can cause delivery problems for you.
What does this mean when it comes to using URL shorteners (such as bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc.) in email you send out? That depends on why you’re using those URL shorteners.
The URLs in the text/html parts of my message are big and ugly
Unless the URL you’re using is, itself, part of your brand identity then you really don’t need to make the URL in the HTML part of the message visible at all. Instead of using ‘<a href=”long_ugly_url”> long_ugly_url </a>’ or ‘<a href=”shortened_url”> shortened_url </a>’ use ‘<a href=”long_ugly_url”> friendly phrase </a>’.
(Whatever you do, don’t use ‘<a href=”long_ugly_url”> different_url </a>’, though – that leads to you falling foul of phishing filters).
The URLs in the text/plain parts of my message are big and ugly
The best solution is to fix your web application so that the URLs are smaller and prettier. That will make you seem less dated and clunky both when you send email, and when your users copy and paste links to your site via email or IM or twitter or whatever. “Cool” or “friendly” URLs are great for a lot of reasons, and this is just one. Tim Berners-Lee has some good thoughts on this, and AListApart has two good articles on how to implement them.
If you can’t do that, then using your own, branded URL shortener is the next best thing. Your domain is part of your brand – you don’t want to hide it.
I want to use a catchy URL shortener to enhance my brand
That’s quite a good reason. But if you’re doing that, you’re probably planning to use your own domain for your URL shortener (Google uses goo.gl, Word to the Wise use wttw.me, etc). That will avoid many of the problems with using a generic URL shortener, whether you implement it yourself or use a third party service to run it.
I want to hide the destination URL from recipients and spam filters
Then you’re probably spamming. Stop doing that.
I want to be able to track clicks on the link, using bit.ly’s neat click track reporting
Bit.ly does have pretty slick reporting. But it’s very weak compared to even the most basic clickthrough reporting an ESP offers. An ESP can tell you not just how many clicks you got on a link, but also which recipients clicked and how many clicks there were for all the links in a particular email or email campaign, and how that correlates with “opens” (however you define that).
So bit.ly’s tracking is great if you’re doing ad-hoc posts to twitter, but if you’re sending bulk email you (or your ESP) can do so much better.
I want people to have a short URL to share on twitter
Almost all twitter clients will abbreviate a URL using some URL shortener automatically if it’s long. Unless you’re planning on using your own branded URL shortener, using someone else’s will just hide your brand. It’s all probably going to get rewritten as t.co/UgLy in the tweet itself anyway.
If your ESP offers their own URL shortener, integrating into their reporting system for URLs in email or on twitter that’s great – they’ll be policing users of that just the same as users of their email service, so you’re unlikely to be sharing it with bad spammers for long enough to matter.
All the cool kids are using bit.ly, so I need to to look cool
This one I can’t help with. You’ll need to decide whether bit.ly links really look cool to your recipient demographic (Spoiler: probably not) and, if so, whether it’s worth the delivery problems they risk causing.
And, remember, your domain is part of your brand. If you’re hiding your domain, you’re hiding your branding.
So… I really do need a URL shortener. Now what?
It’s cheap and easy to register a domain for just your own use as a URL shortener. Simply by having your own domain, you avoid most of the problems. You can run a URL shortener yourself – there are a bunch of freely available packages to do it, or it’s only a few hours work for a developer to create from scratch.
Or you can use a third-party provider to run it for you. (Using a third-party provider does mean that you’re sharing the same IP address as other URL shorteners – but everyone you’re sharing with are probably people like you, running a private URL shortener, so the risk is much, much smaller than using a freely available public URL shortener service.)
These are fairly simple fixes for a problem that’s here today, and is going to get worse in the future.

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Deliverability and IP addresses

Almost 2 years ago I wrote a blog post titled The Death of IP Based Reputation. These days I’m even more sure that IP based reputation is well and truly dead for legitimate senders.
There are a lot of reasons for this continued change. Deliverability is hard when some people like the same email other people think is spam

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