Permission trumps good metrics

Most companies and senders will tell you they follow all the best practices. My experience says they follow the easy best practices. They’ll comply with technical best practices, they’ll tick all the boxes for content and formatting, they’ll make a nod to permission. Then they’re surprised that their mail delivery isn’t great.

Too many senders, ESPs and deliverability services companies, believe that the key to the inbox is checking all the best practice boxes. List hygiene and list cleaning companies are the most obvious example. Bounces are a key reason for bad delivery. If we remove all or most bounces then our numbers comply with the standard metrics. If our complaints are low then we comply with the standard metrics. If our metrics all look right, then we’re clearly doing everything right and we should reach the inbox.

That’s really not the case, though. Good delivery is much more than just hitting the right metrics. Good delivery is more than doing the technical stuff right. Good delivery requires sending mail people want, and much of that can’t be measured in bounces or complaints.

As an example, there’s an ESP I only discovered because I received mail from their customers. Don’t know anyone working there, have never heard of them before. All I know about them is in my inbox.

Technical check

I’ll give the ESP this, they have their customers technically set up correctly. Going through the tests I do when auditing clients I can’t find anything really wrong.

  • Each customer gets their own d= domain.
  • That d=domain aligns with the from address.
  • SPF is set up correctly.
  • SPF validates
  • MessageID is correctly formatted
  • HTML looks reasonably clean
  • ListUnsub header is present
  • mailto: and href: links in proper order
  • CAN SPAM address
  • Unsub link works

There’s even a website on the domain used for SPF authentication. It’s not horribly useful, but it’s there.

It says:

Congrats on your hacking skills!

Wonder what this site is? We are an award winning high quality ESP – an Email Marketing Service.

We help companies maintain their brand with Marketing as well [sic] Transactional messages.

EMAIL.DELIVERED.PERIOD.

(Note: I don’t believe taking a domain name and typing it into a browser bar is hacking. I don’t think being able to read full headers is hacking.)

This email meets all the technical standards. If I had to guess, I’d say that the bounce rates are low. I expect complaint rates are also very low. Overall, these senders are following all the standard best practices and if I had to score them just on meeting technical standards I’d give them a 10/10.

Deliverability check

That’s the technical piece of delivery. What else matters for delivery? Things like format, content, and relevance.
Format wise, the messages themselves are text, not plain text but nicely formatted business style text. They almost look like personal mail. Nothing remarkable, but probably a good fit for the busy small business person.

Content wise, it’s well written copy. Each of the senders clearly put some work into the wording and phrasing. It’s not something they just dashed off, but doesn’t look overly polished. Again, nothing remarkable but probably a good fit for the audience.

As I am the audience for three of these messages, I get to decide if these messages are relevant.

  • One is selling me a plugin for Outlook to “transform my sales process.” Well, I won’t use Windows for email and I don’t have Outlook installed on my mac. So that’s not very relevant to me.
  • Another is selling me qualified sales leads. Almost all of our business comes through word of mouth and recommendations from industry folks. So that’s not very relevant to me.
  • The third is from my BFF on LinkedIn. He writes articles on investing, music, and life and will subscribe me unless I tell him stop. Even though he claims he’s my BFF, his opinions aren’t very relevant.

Overall, it’s a strong showing in formatting and content with a definite lack of relevancy. Overall, I give it a 8/10.

Permission check

And here’s where we get to the problem. None of these senders have permission to email me, and they certainly don’t have permission to email me at that address. There’s not much to say here other than to give them a 0/10 on permission.

Compliance Check

ESPs have two big roles in deliverability: technical and compliance. I mentioned the technical above and they’re doing stuff right. There are a few things I can’t see from receiving emails, like throttles and connection limits, but I suspect they’re right in the mainstream there as well.

The compliance piece is actually a big part of what makes deliverability from specific ESPs good. The reason might surprise people. ESPs do have reputations, but they aren’t the same as sender reputations. An ESP builds their reputation by effectively dealing with problem customers. Everyone leaks, bad mail comes out of every network at one time or another. Spamhaus, filtering vendors and ISPs know this. But they also know that some ESPs monitor and police their customers more than others. These ISPs often get the benefit of the doubt before blocks go up (dot zero listings for instance)

The ESP they’re using does have a decent looking AUP, evening mentioning they use the Spamhaus definition of spam. Unfortunately, I reported two emails to abuse@ and received a disappointing response. All they said was they would suppress my email address.

This is disappointing. I mean, it’s great that they’re going to suppress my address. But that doesn’t address the broader issue: their customers are sending mail in violation of their AUP. Last week I mentioned a complaint to an ESP (again, one I’d never heard of) that sent me back a message that said, “Thank you for notifying us, we take these issues seriously.  I’m investigating with the sender and will let you know when its resolved.” And they did!
I’ll give their compliance a 3/10, because at least they’re suppressing my address.

Overall

Adding up the scores I get 21/40. OK, so this is a somewhat arbitrary scale. But, the point remains, permission is critical to delivery. You can do all the technical stuff and content stuff right, but if you fail to get permission delivery is going to suffer. And if your ESP isn’t up on compliance, then they’re not doing you any favors.

B2B spam is still spam. Spam isn’t defined by what’s in it or by whether it’s authenticated or if it’s has the right metrics. Spam is unsolicited email. Permission is key. Permission trumps all.

Related Posts

Dr. Livingston, I presume?

I linked to Al’s post about misdirected emails and how annoying it is for people who receive emails. I’ve previously talked about the problems associated with not handling misdirected emails properly.
It’s really annoying getting email that you never signed up for. For instance, one of my email addresses gets quite a bit of misdirected email. Oddly enough, much of this mail comes addressed to “Mrs. Christine Stelfox” and advertises various services. The problem is, I’m not Mrs. Christine Stelfox and I don’t live in the UK.
I’ve been getting this misdirected email for a while. In fact, I’ve even tried to track down the source of this just to make it stop. But I can’t seem to get that to happen. The senders tell me simply that I opted in, and that if I want to opt-out, here’s a link. Sometimes I have more luck contacting ESPs, but not always.
In fact, recently I reported spam to Mrs. Stelfox to a European based ESP. I got a response from their delivery head, who asked a lot of questions about the email address. What kind of spamtrap was it? How long had I had it? Is it possible it’s a recycled address? It’s really not, though. It’s an address I’ve had since early 1994, and it’s not really a trap as I still actually use if for some me. But I’ve not used it for commercial email since sometime in the late ’90s. And I’ve certainly never claimed to be a Mrs. Stelfox.
This really isn’t a case where I forgot I signed up. This isn’t a case where someone had the address before me. This is either some confused person using my address or some company in the UK selling my email address as belonging to someone else. I’ve tried to track this down in the past to get off the list of whomever is selling this address. But I’ve never had any luck.
There isn’t a lot of recourse here. I can continue to unsubscribe the addresses, but that doesn’t resolve the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that many marketers think it’s acceptable to purchase (or append) email addresses with no regard for the fact that sometimes their data suppliers are wrong.
It’s not just this one address, either. Another one of my email addresses is being sold as “Mrs. Laura Corbishley” of the UK as well. Sometimes I get the same spam to Mrs. Christine Stelfox and Mrs. Laura Corbishley. Other times I get different spams to each address, possibly because Mrs. Stelfox is behind some commercial email filters and Mrs. Corbishley isn’t.
Misdirected emails are annoying. They’re a problem for the people who keep getting them and can’t make them stop. It’s really important that ESPs, companies that send email and companies that sell email addresses have some way to make that mail stop. It doesn’t matter that half a dozen ESPs have put Mrs. Stelfox in their suppression list. Senders are still purchasing that data and are wasting their money. I am still getting spam.
 
 
 

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Who pays for spam?

A couple weeks ago, I published a blog post about monetizing the complaint stream. The premise was that ESPs could offer lower base rates for sending if the customer agreed to pay per complaint. The idea came to me while talking with a deliverability expert at a major ESP. One of their potential customer wanted the ESP to allow them to mail purchased lists. The customer even offered to indemnify the ESP and assume all legal risk for mailing purchased lists.
While on the surface this may seem like a generous offer, there aren’t many legal liabilities associated with sending email. Follow a few basic rules that most of us learn in Kindergarten (say your name, stop poking when asked, don’t lie) and there’s no chance you’ll be legally liable for your actions.
Legal liability is not really the concern for most ESPs. The bigger issues for ESPs including overall sending reputation and cost associated with resolving a block. The idea behind monetizing the complaint stream was making the customer bear some of the risk for bad sends. ESP customers do a lot of bad things, up to and including spamming, without having any financial consequences for the behavior. By sharing  in the non-legal consequences of spamming, the customer may feel some of the effect of their bad decisions.
Right now, ESPs really protect customers from consequences. The ESP pays for the compliance team. The ESP handles negotiations with ISPs and filtering companies. The cost of this is partially built into the sending pricing, but if there is a big problem, the ESP ends up shouldering the bulk of the resolution costs. In some cases, the ESP even loses revenue as they disconnect the sender.
ESPs hide the cost of bad decisions from customers and do not incentivize customers to make good decisions. Maybe if they started making customers shoulder some of the financial liability for spamming there’d be less spamming.

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Do you have an abuse@ address?

I’ve mentioned multiple times before that I really don’t like using personal contacts until and unless the published or official channels fail. I don’t hold this opinion just about resolving delivery issues, but also use official channels when reporting spam to one of my addresses or spam traps.
My usual complaints contain a plain text copy of the mail, including full headers and a short summary of the email address it was sent to. “This is an address that was part of a leak from…” or “This is an address scraped off my website. It’s been removed from the website since 2004” or “This address isn’t used to sign up for any mail.”
Sadly, there are a number of “legitimate” ESPs that don’t have or don’t monitor their abuse address. In some cases it’s an oversight or a break down of internal mail handling. But in most cases, it’s a sign that the ESP doesn’t actually handle abuse.
It’s frustrating to watch an ESP post long blog posts about “best practices” and “effective delivery” and “not spamming” and yet not be able to actually stop their own customers from spamming. It’s not even that I necessarily want them to disconnect their spamming customers (although that would be nice) but suppressing the address that I’ve told them was a spamtrap seems trivial. And yet, a month after my first complaint and weeks after escalating to a personal contact, I’m still getting spam.
The 5 things every ESP should do to handle spam complaints.

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