Doing email right

Over on the MarketingLand website, Len Shneyder talks about 3 companies (Uber, REI and eBay) that do email right. In there he shows how the companies use email to further their business goals while understanding and meeting the needs of their customers.
Meeting the needs of recipients is the way to get your mail to the inbox. Send email that your users want, and they will tell the ISPs when they don’t get your mail. It’s sometimes hard to convince senders of this. Instead they want to tweak URLs or authentication or IPs or domains. But none of those things are what deliverability is all about. Deliverability is about the recipient. Deliverability is about the relationship between the sender and recipient.
Send to the right people – and the right people are those who have asked for and want your mail – and deliverability problems don’t materialize. Sure, every once in a while something might happen that throws mail into the bulk folder for one reason or another. But fighting to get to the inbox isn’t an every day thing. Instead, senders can focus on knowing their users and sending mail that makes them happy when it shows up in the inbox.
 

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Delivery and engagement

Tomorrow is the webinar Mythbusters: Deliverability vs. Engagement. This webinar brings together the ISP speakers from EEC15, plus Matt from Comcast, to expand on their comments. There’s been some confusion about the impact of engagement on delivery and whether or not senders should care about recipient engagement.
My opinion on the matter is well known: recipient engagement drives delivery to the inbox at some providers. I expect tomorrow we’ll hear a couple things from the ISPs.

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It's not fair

In the delivery space, stuff comes in cycles. We’re currently in a cycle where people are unhappy with spam filters. There are two reasons they’re unhappy: false positives and false negatives.
False positives are emails that the user doesn’t think is spam but goes into the bulk folder anyway.
Fales negatives are emails that the user does thing is spam but is delivered to the inbox.
I’ve sat on multiple calls over the course of my career, with clients and potential clients, where the question I cannot answer comes up. “Why do I still get spam?”
I have a lot of thoughts about this question and what it means for a discussion, how it should be answered and what the next steps are. But it’s important to understand that I, and most of my deliverability colleagues, hate this question. Yet we get it all the time. ISPs get it, too.
A big part of the answer is because spammers spend inordinate amounts of time and money trying to figure out how to break filters. In fact, back in 2006 the FTC fined a company almost a million dollars for using deceptive techniques to try and get into filters. One of the things this company did would be to have folks manually create emails to test filters. Once they found a piece of text that would get into the inbox, they’d spam until the filters caught up. Then, they’d start testing content again to see what would get past the filters. Repeat.
This wasn’t some fly by night company. They had beautiful offices in San Francisco with conference rooms overlooking Treasure Island. They were profitable. They were spammers. Of course, not long after the FTC fined them, they filed bankruptcy and disappeared.
Other spammers create and cultivate vast networks of IP addresses and domains to be used in snowshoeing operations. Still other spammers create criminal acts to hijack reputation of legitimate senders to make it to the inbox.
Why do you still get spam? That’s a bit like asking why people speed or run red lights. You still get spam because spammers invest a lot of money and time into sending you spam. They’re OK with only a small percentage of emails getting through filters, they’ll just make it up in volume.
Spam still exists because spammers still exist.
 

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Filters do what we tell them

In the email space we talk about filters as if they were sentient beings. “The filters decided…” “The filters said…” This is convenient shorthand, but tends to mask that filters aren’t actually deciding or saying anything. Filters are software processes that follow rules dictated by the people who create and maintain them. The rules flow from the goals set by the mailbox provider. The mailbox provider sets goals based on what their users tell them. Users communicate what they want by how they interact with email.

What we end up with is a model where a set of people make decisions about what mail should be let in. They pass that decision on to the people who write the filters. The people who write the filters create software that evaluates email based on those goals using information collected from many places, including the endusers.
What mail should be let in is an interesting question, with answers that differ depending on the environment the filter is deployed in.
Consumer ISPs typically want to keep their users happy and safe. Their goals are to stop harmful mail like phishing, or mail containing viruses or malware. They also want to deliver mail that makes their users happy. As one ISP employee put it, “We want our users to be delighted with your mail.”
Businesses have a few other goals when it comes to filters. They, too, need filters to protect their network from malicious actors. As businesses are often directly targeted by bad actors, this is even more important. They also want to get business related email, whether that be from customers or vendors. They may want to ensure that certain records are kept and laws are followed.
Governments have another set of goals. Universities and schools have yet another set of goals. And, of course, there are folks who run their own systems for their own use.
Complicating the whole thing is that some groups have different tolerances for mistakes. For instance, many of our customers are folks dealing with being blocked by commercial filters. Therefore, we don’t run commercial filters. That does mean we see a lot of viruses and malware and rely on other strategies to stop a compromise, strategies that wouldn’t be as viable in a different environment.
Filters are built to meet specific user needs. What they do isn’t random, it’s not unknowable. They are designed to accomplished certain goals and generally they’re pretty good at what they do. Understanding the underlying goals of filters can help drive solutions to poor delivery.
Use the shorthand, talk about what filters are doing. But remember that there are people behind the filters. Those filters are constantly maintained in order to keep up with ever changing mail streams. They aren’t static and they aren’t forgotten. They are updated regularly. They are fluid, just like the mail they act on.

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