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.
You’ve started to notice that your campaigns aren’t working as well as they used to. Your metrics suggest fewer people are clicking through, perhaps because more of your mail is ending up in junk folders. Maybe your outbound queues are bigger than they used to be.
You’ve not changed anything – you’re doing what’s worked well for years – and it’s not like you’ve suddenly had an influx of spamming customers (or, if you have, you’ve dealt with them much the same as you have in the past).
So what changed?
Everything else did. The email ecosystem is in a perpetual state of change.
There’s not a bright line that says “email must be this good to be delivered“.
Instead, most email filtering practice is based on trying to identify mail that users want, or don’t want, and delivering based on that. There’s some easy stuff – mail that can be easily identified as unwanted (malware, phishing, botnet spew) and mail that can easily be identified as wanted (SPF/DKIM authenticated mail from senders with clean content and a consistent history of sending mail that customers interact with and never mark as spam).
The hard bit is the greyer mail in the middle. Quite a lot of it may be wanted, but not easily identified as wanted mail. And a lot of it isn’t wanted, but not easily identified as spam. That’s where postmasters, filter vendors and reputation providers spend a lot of their effort on mitigation, monitoring recipient response to that mail and adapting their mail filtering to improve it.
Postmasters, and other filter operators, don’t really care about your political views or the products you’re trying to sell, nor do they make moral judgements about your legal content (some of the earliest adopters of best practices have been in the gambling and pornography space…). What they care about is making their recipients happy, making the best predictions they can about each incoming mail, based on the information they have. And one of the the most efficient ways to do that is to look at the grey area to see what mail is at the back of the pack, the least wanted, and focusing on blocking “mail like that”.
If you’re sending mail in that grey area – and as an ESP you probably are – you want to stay near the front or at least the middle of the grey area mailers, and definitely out of that “least wanted” back of the pack. Even if your mail isn’t great, competitors who are sending worse mail than you will probably feel more filtering pain and feel it sooner.
Some of those competitors are updating their practices for 2015, buying in to authentication, responding rapidly to complaints and feedback loop data, and preemptively terminating spammy customers – and by doing so they’re both sending mail that recipients want and making it easy for ISPs (and their postmasters and their machine learning systems) to recognize that they’re doing that.
Other competitors aren’t following this years best practices, have been lazy about providing customer-specific authentication, are letting new customers send spam with little oversight, and aren’t monitoring feedback and delivery to make sure they’re a good mail stream. They end up in the spam folder, their good customers migrate elsewhere because of “delivery issues” and bad actors move to them because they have a reputation for “not being picky about acquisition practices“. They risk spiraling into wholesale bulk foldering and becoming just a “bulletproof spam-friendly ESP”.
If you’re not improving your practices you’re probably being passed by your competitors who are, and you risk falling behind to the back of the pack.
And your competitors don’t need to outrun the bear, they just need to outrun you.
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.
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.