Thoughts on SenderScore

Kevin Senne posted over on the Oracle blog about how we need to stop caring about SenderScore and why it’s not as useful a metric as it used to be.
I can’t argue with anything he’s said. I think there is way too much focus on IP reputation and SenderScore. There’s so much more to deliverability than just one or two factors.
In fact, if you’ve been to any of my recent webinars or talks you will probably have seen some version of this image in my slides:
SenderScore99_cropped
Basically, just because you have a great SenderScore doesn’t mean you’re going to have good delivery.  Likewise, having a poor SenderScore doesn’t mean your mail is destined to be undelivered.
I tell clients, and people who ask about SenderScore that it reflects the data that Return Path gets, run through their proprietary algorithms to come up with a score. And that score is relevant for those ISPs that pay attention to it. But most ISPs make the deliver or not deliver decision based on their own internal data, not on the IPs SenderScore.

What’s more important for deliverability is the email reputation. Email reputation combines content reputation, link reputation, IP reputation and sender reputation into one score. Emails with poor reputation are often blocked during the SMTP transaction. After mail is accepted it goes through the personalized filters and then it’s delivered to the inbox or the bulk folder.
NewDeliverabilityModel
Filters are complex. I’m not ready to give up any available data, including the SenderScore, when troubleshooting delivery problems for my clients. But I also don’t work to fix a client’s SenderScore. I work to fix a client’s deliverability. Sometimes that improvement is shown in SenderScore improvements. Sometimes it’s not.

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Twisting information around

One of my mailing lists was asking questions today about an increase in invitation mailings from Spotify. I’d heard about them recently, so I started digging through my mailbox to see if I’d received one of these invites. I hadn’t, but it clued me into a blog post from early this year that I hadn’t seen before.
Research: ESPs might get you blacklisted.
That article is full of FUD, and the author quite clearly doesn’t understand what the data he is relying on means. He also doesn’t provide us with enough information that we can repeat what he did.
But I think his take on the publicly available data is common. There are a lot of people who don’t quite understand what the public data means or how it is collected. We can use his post as a starting off point for understanding what publicly available data tells us.
The author chooses 7 different commercial mailers as his examples. He claims the data on these senders will let us evaluate ESPs, but these aren’t ESPs. At best they’re ESP customers, but we don’t know that for sure. He claims that shared IPs means shared reputation, which is true. But he doesn’t claim that these are shared IPs. In fact, I would bet my own reputation on Pizza Hut having dedicated IP addresses.
The author chooses 4 different publicly available reputation services to check the “marketing emails” against. I am assuming he means he checked the sending IP addresses because none of these services let you check emails.
He then claims these 4 measures

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Do Gmail tabs hurt email marketing?

Earlier this year, Gmail rolled out a new way for users to organize their inbox: tabs. Tabs were an attempt by Gmail to help Gmail users organize their mail, particularly programmatically generated email like social media alerts and marketing mail. While many of us took a wait and see approach, a number of email marketers took this as one of the 7 signs of the apocalypse and the end of email marketing as we know it.
Dozens of marketers wrote article with such titles as “7 ways to survive Gmail tabs” and headlines that declared “Thanks to Gmail’s new tabs, promotional e-mails are now shunted off to a secondary inbox. If you rely on e-mail marketing, you should be worried.” Marketers large and small responded by sending emails to recipients begging them to move marketing mail out of the promotions tab and into the inbox.
A number of bloggers, reporters and marketers, myself included, tried to tame the panic. Not because we necessarily supported tabs, but because we really had no insight into how this would affect recipients interacting with email.
This week Return Path published a whitepaper on the effect of Gmail tabs on email marketing (.pdf link).
Not only did Return Path’s research show little negative effect of tabs, they actually saw some positive effects of tabs on how recipients interact with commercial email. Overall, the introduction of tabs in the gmail interface may be a improvement for email marketers.

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AOL starts using Sender Score Certification

Good news for Sender Score Certified IPs. Return Path recently announced that AOL has joined the list of ISPs offering preferential treatment to certified IPs.
 

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