A bunch of folks today mentioned they were seeing poor reputation for formerly good reputations on Google Postmaster Tools. I’m seeing a lot of screen shots that look like this one.
It looks like something is going on over there that has nothing to do with actual reputation. Could be a reporting bug, could be a filtering problem. I’m not seeing people mention delivery problems, just that the reputation monitor is showing bad reputation.
Reputation is calculated based on actions. Send mail people want and like and interact with and get a good reputation. Send mail people don’t want and don’t like and don’t interact with and get a bad reputation.
Reputation is not
… about who the sender is.
… about legitimacy.
… about speech.
… about message.
Reputation is
… about sender behavior.
… about recipient behavior.
… about how wanted a particular mail is forecast to be.
… based on facts.
Reputation isn’t really that complicated, but there are a lot of different beliefs about reputation that seem to make it complicated.
The reputation of a sender can be different at different receivers.
Senders sometimes target domains differently. That means one receiver may see acceptable behavior but another receiver may see a completely different behavior.
Receivers sometimes have different standards. These include standards for what bad behavior is and how it is measured. They may also have different thresholds for things like complaints and bounces.
What this means is that delivery at one receiver has no impact on delivery at another. Just because ISP A delivers a particular mail to the inbox doesn’t mean that ISP B will accept the same mail. Each receiver has their own standards and sometimes senders need to tune mail for a specific receiver. One of my clients, for instance, tunes engagement filters based on the webmail domain in the email address. Webmail domain A needs a different level of engagement than webmail domain B.
Public reputation measures are based on data feeds.
There are multiple public sources where senders can check their reputation. Most of these sources depend on data feeds from receiver partners. Sometimes they curate and maintain their own data sources, often in the form of spamtrap feeds. But these public sources are only as good as their data analysis. Sometimes, they can show a good reputation where there isn’t one, or a bad reputation where there isn’t one.
Email reputation is composed of lots of different reputations.
Email reputation determines delivery. Getting to the inbox doesn’t mean sending from an IP with a good reputation. IP reputation is combined with domain reputation and content reputation to get the email reputation. IP reputation is often treated as the only valuable reputation because of the prevalence of IP based blocking. But there are SMTP level blocks against domains as well, often for phishing or virus links. Good IP reputation is necessary but not sufficient for good email delivery.
Reputation is about what a sender does, not about who a sender is.
Just because a company is a household name doesn’t mean their practices are good enough to make it to the inbox. Email is a meritocracy. Send mail that merits the inbox and it will get to recipients. Send email that doesn’t, and suffer the repercussions.
Google Apps for ISPs is being shut down. While this was a scheduled end of life, apparently some users weren’t notified (always keep the contact email address up to date at your vendor!) and other users were told that it would be discontinued in July and were surprised when their service was turned off a month earlier than they expected.
I’ve not seen any reports of mail bouncing due to this yet, but it’s likely that some consumer ISPs will be scrambling to migrate to new email providers and their inbound mail may be a mess for a while. If you see domain-wide problems at consumer domains, check to see if their MXes point at the google aspmx cluster.
It seems to be a rolling shutdown, and some ISPs have apparently had their service extended by a few days or weeks, so issues may start with some domains throughout the month.
September’s big adventure was our trip to Stockholm, where I gave the keynote address at the APSIS Conference (Look for a wrapup post with beautiful photos of palaces soon!) and had lots of interesting conversations about all things email-related.
Now that we’re back, we’re working with clients as they prepare for the holiday mailing season. We wrote a post on why it’s so important to make sure you’ve optimized your deliverability strategy and resolved any open issues well in advance of your sends. Steve covered some similar territory in his post “Outrunning the Bear”. If you haven’t started planning, start now. If you need some help, give us a call.
In that post, we talked a bit about the increased volumes of both marketing and transactional email during the holiday season, and I did a followup post this week about how transactional email is defined — or not — both by practice and by law. I also wrote a bit about reputation and once again emphasized that sending mail people actually want is really the only strategy that can work in the long term.
While we were gone, I got a lot of spam, including a depressing amount of what I call “legitimate spam” — not just porn and pharmaceuticals, but legitimate companies with appalling address acquisition and sending strategies. I also wrote about spamtraps again (bookmark this post if you need more information on spamtraps, as I linked to several previous discussions we’ve had on the subject) and how we need to start viewing them as symptoms of larger list problems, not something that, once eradicated, means a list is healthy. I also posted about Jan Schaumann’s survey on internet operations, and how this relates to the larger discussions we’ve had on the power of systems administrators to manage mail (see Meri’s excellent post here<).
I wrote about privacy and tracking online and how it’s shifted over the past two decades. With marketers collecting and tracking more and more data, including personally-identifiable information (PII), the risks of organizational doxxing are significant. Moreso than ever before, marketers need to be aware of security issues. On the topic of security and cybercrime, Steve posted about two factor authentication, and how companies might consider providing incentives for customers to adopt this model.