Where to get deliverability help

laura
Industry
February 7, 2018

There are lots of places to get deliverability help, I thought I’d list some of them here so I have a post to point people to.

Of course, we provide deliverability consulting services and have done since 2001. Our customers are mostly large companies sending millions of emails a month. I focus mostly on complex problems that other deliverability folks haven’t solved. Overall I focus on understanding client programs and business needs as well as current deliverability situation. Once I have a picture of a client’s program, I craft solutions that work with their business processes and get mail to the inbox. We don’t sell tools or certification. Instead, we work with our clients to help them fix delivery and teach them how to analyze the data they already have.
The nature of the work I do is intensive and I limit the number of clients I have in order to provide personalized service. But that’s OK! We have 2000+ blog posts to answer questions. And, there are lots of other companies that provide deliverability help. Here’s a partial list of places to look for resources.

Your Service Provider

Many (most?) ESPs and MTAs provide deliverability help for customers. In some cases, this is primarily self serve through their website support pages, blog posts, and knowledge bases. Other ESPs have dedicated deliverability support staff to answer questions and help customers answer questions. MTA vendors and SaaS SMTP providers also provide deliverability support.

ISPs and Filtering Companies

Many ISPs and commercial filtering companies also provide deliverability advice in their blogs. Sometimes the information on these sites is not presented in as sender friendly a way as the third parties and the ESPs. I know some of my clients have visited these websites and bristled at the tone. Nevertheless, the information is good and it’s written by the people who block mail. It’s worth looking past the tone and seeing the content.

Email Associations

Most email adjacent organizations provide deliverability resources. The EEC, M3AAWG, and the ESPC are organizations we belong to that provide free deliverability resources, many of them developed through member collaboration. Other organizations, too, have deliverability sections, I’m sure.

Governments

Many governments provide information about local laws. Not necessarily deliverability advice, but vital for successful businesses.

Third Party Tools

Gone are the days when Return Path was really the only game in town for monitoring inbox delivery. There are multiple players in the market including 250OK, GreenArrow, Postmastery and eDataSource. But not everything in email is about monitoring inbox delivery. Many other companies have email focused products and provide information on delivery and email issues including (in no particular order) places like InboxPros, Litmus, Sendforensics, dmarcian, ValiMail, Agari.
I know I’ve missed some resources, this wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive list. Just some information about where to look for deliverability help besides yours truly.

Thinking about deliverability

I was chatting with folks over on one of the email slack channels today. The discussion was about an ESP not wanting to implement a particular change as it would hurt deliverability. It led me down a path of thinking about how we think of deliverability and how that informs how we approach email.
The biggest problem I see is the black and white thinking.
There’s an underlying belief in the deliverability, receiving, and filtering communities that the only way to affect sending behavior is to block (or threaten to block) mail.

This was true back in the ancient times (the late 90’s). We didn’t have sophisticated tools and fast CPUs. There weren’t a lot of ways to handle bad mail other than to block. Now the landscape is different. We have many more tools and the computing capacity to quickly sort large streams of data.
At most places these days, blocking is an escalation, not a warning shot. Many places rate limit and bulk folder questionable mail as a first strike against problem mail. Sometimes the mail is bad enough to result in a block. Other times, it’s not bad enough to block, so it disappears into the bulk folder.
There’s a corresponding belief in the sending community that if their behavior doesn’t result in blocking then they’re acting acceptably. This isn’t true either. There are a lot of things you can do (or not do) that don’t help delivery, but will actively harm delivery. Likewise, there are things you can do that don’t actively harm delivery, but will help. All of these things add up to reaching the inbox.

What We Do

Occasionally when we meet longtime readers of the blog at conferences and industry events, they are surprised to learn that we are not just bloggers. We actually spend most of our time consulting with companies and service providers to optimize their email delivery. Though we try to avoid using the blog as a WttW sales pitch, we thought it might be useful to devote a short post to explaining a bit more about what we do.

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.