Blackboxes and unknown effects

In my previous career I studied the effect of alcohol on developing embryos. It’s a bit weird I ended up in that field because embryological development always seemed to complex to me. And it was and is complicated. In a lot of ways, though, it was good training for deliverability. We dealt with a lot of processes that seem, on the surface, straightforward.
Fertilization happens, then you get a flat group of cells, those cells fold up into the neural tube, cells migrate around, things happen, limbs form, organs form and 21 days later you have a fluffy little chick.
The details in all those steps, though. They’re a bit more complicated, looking something like this:
There are lots of different things going on inside the embryo to take it from a single cell up to a complex multicellular being. Genes turn on, genes turn off at different times in development, often driven by overlapping concentration gradients. Genes turn each other and themselves on and off. It’s complex, though, and there are things that happen that we don’t quite understand and have to black box. “If I add this protein, or take this gene and that gene away… what happens?”
A lot of that is like what email reputation is these days. There isn’t one factor in reputation, there are hundreds or thousands. They interact with each other, sometimes turning up reputation, sometimes turning down reputation. We figure this out by poking at the black box and seeing what happens. Unlike development, though, delivery rules are not fixed. They are changing along the way.
It’s not simple to explain delivery and how all the moving parts interact with each other. We don’t always know that doing A will lead to X. Because A -> X is not a straight line and there are other things that impact that line. Those other things also impact A, X and each other.
Delivery is a tangled web. On the surface it seems simple, but when you start peeling back the layers you discover the jumble of factors that all interact with each other. It’s what makes this a challenging field for all of us.

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End of an era

A few moments ago, I cancelled one of my email addresses. This is an address that has been mine since somewhere around 1993 or 4. It was old enough to vote. And now it’s no more.
I am not even sure why I kept it for so long. It was my dialup account back when I was in grad school in Delaware. When I moved to Madison to work at the university, I kept it as a shell account and email address. I gave it up as my primary email address about the time it was bought by a giant networking company. By then I had my own domain and a mail server living behind the futon in the living room. That was back when we started WttW, somewhere around 2002.
15 years the address has mostly laid dormant. I used it for a couple yahoo groups accounts, but just lists that I lurked on.
I did use it as research for some past clients, typically the ones using affiliate marketers. “Our affiliates only ever send opt in mail!” Yeah, no. See, look, your affiliate is spamming me. My favorite was when said customer put me on the phone with the affiliate.

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SHOUTY CAPS!!!

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Over at Meh Glenn Fleishman has put together a fascinating two-parter on the history of using ALL CAPS for emphasis. And SHOUTING.

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Truth, myths and realities

For a long time it was a known fact that certain ISPs recycled abandoned addresses into spamtraps. There were long discussions by senders about this process and how it happened. Then at a conference a few years ago representatives of ISPs got up and announced that they do not recycle addresses. This led to quite a bit of consternation about how deliverability folks were making things up and were untrustworthy and deceptive.

In the early 2000’s ISPs were throwing a lot of things at the wall to deal with mail streams that were 80 – 90% bulk. They tried many different things to try and tame volumes that were overwhelming infrastructure. ISPs did try recycled traps. I know, absolutely know, two did. I am very sure that others did, too, but don’t have specific memories of talking to specific people about it.
At that time, a lot of deliverability knowledge was shared through word of mouth. That turned into a bit of an oral history. The problem with oral history is that context and details get lost. We can use the story of the ISP that did/did not recycle traps as an example.
Deliverability folks talk about an ISP that recycles traps. They don’t mention how often it happens. Some folks make the assumption that this is an ongoing process. It’s not, but anyone who knows it’s not risks violating confidences if they correct it. Besides, if senders believe it’s an ongoing process maybe they’ll be better behaved. Eventually, the story becomes all ISPs recycle traps all the time. This is our “fact” that’s actually a myth.
Then an ISP employee goes to a conference an definitively states they don’t recycle traps. I believe he stated the truth as he knows it to be. That ISP moved on from recycled traps to other kinds of traps because there were better ways to monitor spam.
We were talking about this on one of the deliverability lists and I told another story.
[ISP] recycled addresses once – back when JD was there which must have been, oh, around 2005/6 or so. I heard this directly from JD. It wasn’t done again, but a whole bunch of people just assumed it was an ongoing thing. Since my knowledge was a private conversation between JD and me, I never felt comfortable sharing the information. Given the circumstances, I’ve decided it’s OK to start sharing that end of the story a little more freely.
No one set out to create a myth, it just happened. No one intended to mislead. But sometimes it happens.

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