Poor delivery at Gmail but no where else

I’ve mentioned before that I can often tell what ISP is making filter changes by what my calls are about. The last few weeks it’s been Gmail where folks are struggling to get to the inbox. One of the things most clients and potential clients have mentioned is that they’re not having any problems at the other major ISPs.

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Gmail’s filters are probably the most extensive and complex of all the major webmail providers. Their ability to process data and pull signal out of noise, even when it is all noise, is unmatched in the space. But, still, I wasn’t sure why so many companies were struggling just with Gmail.

I’ve been noodling around with this. Could it be that Gmail is doing something very different than other companies? Are they assigning reputation in ways that are different? Do we need to change our strategies to deal with Gmail? Are there different things we should be telling folks?

Then, I realized the big difference between Gmail and the other webmail providers is their FBL. With the other major webmail providers senders can clean their lists just by removing anyone who hits the “this is spam” button. This lets senders be sloppy with acquiring email addresses without too many consequences. Gmail, however, only tells about complaints, they don’t tell you who is making them. Gmail puts the onus on senders to figure out how to send mail to people who want it.

It also means that Gmail is a more realistic view into what subscribers think about a mail stream. It’s easy to forget that everyone who hits this-is-spam actually gave the sender an email address in the first place. The fact that senders can’t just remove them from the mailing program, means the poor reputation builds up over time. Eventually, the number of complaints is going to go over whatever the appropriate threshold level is, and there’s no easy way to reduce it.

I’m not sure what the solution is. I do know that bad reputations at Gmail take some significant work to repair. There’s no short cut, senders have to get rid of subscribers who don’t like the mail. Identifying those subscribers can be a challenge. We’ve had good luck with some clients, but for others the fixes are a significant challenge and tough for their business model to absorb. The good news is that the pain can be short lived and we’ve been able to ramp mail back up eventually.

Overall, Gmail delivery is harder than a lot of other places. Some of that is because senders use FBLs as a crutch to avoid having effective data hygiene on their signups. That works for those ISPs that send FBL messages, but isn’t so effective at Gmail. Maybe there’s some specific hygiene to do just on Gmail addresses. Working on a better solution than just aggressive hygiene and friction during signup.

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Harvesting and forging email addresses

For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam.
Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website less than a month and I’m already getting lots of spam to it. Most of it is business related spam, but there’s a couple things that make me think that someone has been signing that address up to mailing lists.
One is the confirmation email I received from Yelp. I don’t actually believe Yelp harvested my address and tried to create me an email account. I was happy when I got the first mail from Yelp. It said “click here to confirm your account.” Yay! Yelp is actually using confirmations so I just have to ignore the mail and that will all go away.
At least I was happy about it, until I started getting Yelp newsletters to that address.
Yelp gets half a star for attempting to do COI, but loses half for sending newsletters to people who didn’t confirm their account.
I really didn’t believe that people would grab a clearly tagged address off the blog and subscribe it to mailing lists or networking sites. I simply didn’t believe this happened anymore. I know forge subscribing used to be common, but it does appear that someone forge signed me up for a Yelp account. Clearly there are more dumb idiots out there than I thought.
Of course, it’s not just malicious people signing the address up to lists. There are also spammers harvesting directly off the website.
I did expect that there would be some harvesting going on and that I would get spam to the address. I am very surprised at the volume and type of spam, though. I’m getting a lot of chinese language spam, a lot of “join our business organization” spam and mail claiming I subscribed to receive their offers.
Surprisingly, much of the spam to this address violates CAN SPAM in some way shape or form. And I can prove harvesting, which would net treble damages if I had the time or inclination to sue.
It’s been an interesting experience, putting an unfiltered address on the website. Unfortunately, I am at risk of losing your questions because of the amount of spam coming in. I don’t think I’ve missed any, yet, but losing real mail is always a risk when an address gets a lot of spam – whether or not the recipient runs filters.
I’m still pondering solutions, but for now the questions address will remain as it is.

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July 2016: The Month in Email

We got to slow down — and even take a brief vacation — in July, but we still managed to do a bit of blogging here and there, which I’ll recap below in case you missed anything.
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At the beginning of the month, I wrote about email address harvesting from LinkedIn. As you might imagine, I’m not a fan. A permissioned relationship on social media does not equate to permission to email. Check out the post for more on mailing social media contacts.
Even people who are collecting addresses responsibly can face challenges. One of the most important challenges to address is paying attention to your existing subscription processes, testing them regularly, evaluating effectiveness and optimizing as needed.
Our most commented-upon post this month was a pointer to a smart writeup about Hillary Clinton’s email server issues. Commenters were pretty evenly split between those who agreed that they see this kind of workaround frequently, and those who felt like regulatory processes do a good job managing against this kind of “shadow IT” behavior. I wrote a followup post on why we see this kind of workaround frequently in email environments, even in regulated industries, and some trends we’re seeing as things improve.
In other election-related email news, we saw the challenges of campaign email being flagged as spam. As I pointed out, this happens to all campaigns, and is nothing unique to the Trump campaign. Still, there are important lessons for marketers here, too, in terms of list management, email content, frequency, and engagement — all of which are inextricably linked to deliverability.
Speaking of spam and engagement, Steve took a look at some clickthrough tracking revealed through a recent spam message I received — and why legitimate marketers should avoid using these sorts of URL referrers.
On the topic of authentication, I wrote a quick post about how seeing ?all in the SPF record tells me one thing: the person managing the record isn’t doing things properly. Need a refresher on authentication? Our most-read blog post of all time can help you out.
And as always, send me your interesting questions and I’ll be happy to consider them as I resume my Ask Laura column in August.

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Listbombing Webinar

Earlier this week I gave a webinar hosted by the EEC and the DMA discussing the listbombing problem. They will be making the recording available later this week and I will link to it then.
I wish I could say the issue was done and over with and that it was something we don’t have to worry about any longer. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Attacks are ongoing. Many of them are being caught and mitigated, but they’re still occurring.
We can’t let up our guard, though. Attackers will adapt to the mitigations and negate them.
And remember, listbombing is a sign that your subscription process is not collecting accurate data. If Evil Bob or Dumb Bob can give you Real Bob’s address then your data is all suspect. The problem is somewhat in the form, but it’s also in the whole process. What steps can you take to verify data without creating too much friction in the process?
This is an opportunity for forward thinking companies to reconsider their subscription and address acquisition processes. How do we get Bob’s address and information without Evil Bob or Dumb Bob giving us bad data and without contributing to the overall abuse online.
 

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