What does mitigation really mean?

It is a regular occurrence that senders ask filters and ISPs for mitigation. But there seems to be some confusion as to what mitigation really means. I regularly hear from senders who seem to think that once they’ve asked for mitigation that they don’t have to worry about filtering or blocking at that ISP for a while. They’re surprised when a few weeks or even days after they asked for mitigation their mail is, one again, blocked or in the bulk folder.

The words What Makes You Special on a badge, asking the question of what characteristics set you apart as an individual as different, unique, distinguished or better than the rest.

What is mitigation?

Think of mitigation as a flag that tells spam filters to ignore the history for an IP or domain. The history isn’t deleted or removed, it’s still there. But the “start date” is moved to the mitigation date. If I am a sender that’s been using an IP for a few years and I have a few bad months of sends in the middle, I can ask the ISP to mitigate the effect of those bad months on my reputation. The sender starts over fresh, with none of the bad history.

Mitigation is not a get out of jail free card.

Mitigation is not a get out of spam folder free card. This is not something offered to senders who have a poor history. It’s primarily intended for senders who are normally good senders but had some rough sends. The intention behind mitigation is to give senders a way to get out of the spam folder after they’ve fixed their problems. The infamous MS response “we see no problem with your delivery” in respect to spam foldering means exactly that according to their numbers, mail should be delivered to the spam folder.

Mitigation is not automatic.

In most cases mitigation is handled by a human being, that is following policy established by their employer. Real people review the internal data and dashboards and make a decision based on that review. Senders who have a long history of marginal mail are less likely to receive mitigation. The corollary is that senders who have a history of decent mail but a few bad sends are very likely to receive mitigation.

Mitigation requires plausibility.

Email delivery requires cooperation among senders and receivers. Mitigation requires trust on the part of the ISP, and every ISP rep has multiple stories of spammers who abused that trust. Senders who demonstrate they’re acting in good faith, by making receiver visible changes before requesting mitigation, are much more likely to receive mitigation. Repeatedly asking for mitigation decreases the chances of it being granted. Remember, mitigation doesn’t erase data, it simply resets the start time for analysis. The person handling mitigation can see that it was granted and nothing changed. It’s not a plausible request the second, or third, or fourth time.

Mitigation is an exception.

Asking for mitigation is a normalized pathway, but it’s not normal. Senders make the mistake of thinking if they got mitigation once, they just have to ask again. That mistake leads them to ask for mitigation without changing anything about their sends before or after the mitigation. As a result, they discover their mail is back in the spam folder. This also leads to mitigation not being granted a second or third time.

Don’t rely on mitigation.

No sender should rely on mitigation to get to the inbox. Instead, senders should focus on the fundamentals of good delivery: sending mail people ask for and expect. Everything else is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Pattern matching primates

Why do we see faces where there are none? Paradolia
Why do we look at random noise and see patterns? Patternicity
Why do we think we have discovered what’s causing filtering if we change one thing and email gets through?
It’s all because we’re pattern matching primates, or as Michael Shermer puts it “people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.”
Our brains are amazing and complex and filter a lot of information so we don’t have to think of it. Our brains also fill in a lot of holes. We’re primed at seeing patterns, even when there’s no real pattern. Our brains can, and do, lie to us all the time. For me, some of the important part of my Ph.D. work was learning to NOT trust what I thought I saw, and rather to effectively observe and test. Testing means setting up experiments in different ways to make it easier to not draw false conclusions.
Humans are also prone to confirmation bias: where we assign more weight to things that agree with our preconceived notions.
Take the email marketer who makes a number of changes to a campaign. They change some of the recipient targeting, they add in a couple URLs, they restructure the mail to change the text to image ratio and they add the word free to the subject line. The mail gets filtered to the bulk folder and they immediately jump to the word free as the proximate cause of the filtering. They changed a lot of things but they focus on the word free.
Then they remove the word free from the subject line and all of a sudden the emails are delivering. Clearly the filter in question is blocking mail with free in the subject line.
Well, no. Not really. Filters are bigger and more complex than any of us can really understand. I remember a couple years ago, when a few of my close friends were working at AOL on their filter team. A couple times they related stories where the filters were doing things that not even the developers really understood.
That was a good 5 or 6 years ago, and filters have only gotten more complex and more autonomous. Google uses an artificial neural network as their spam filter. I don’t really believe that anything this complex just looks at free in the subject line and filters based on that.
It may be that one thing used to be responsible for filtering, but those days are long gone. Modern email filters evaluate dozens or hundreds of factors. There’s rarely one thing that causes mail to go to the bulk folder. So many variables are evaluated by filters that there’s really no way to pinpoint the EXACT thing that caused a filter to trigger. In fact, it’s usually not one thing. It could be any number of things all adding up to mean this may not be mail that should go to the inbox.
There are, of course, some filters that are one factor. Filters that listen to p=reject requests can and do discard mail that fails authentication. Virus filters will often discard mail if they detect a virus in the mail. Filters that use blocklists will discard mail simply due to a listing on the blocklist.
Those filters address the easy mail. They leave the hard decisions to the more complex filters. Most of those filters are a lot more accurate than we are at matching patterns. Us pattern matching primates want to see patterns and so we find them.

Thoughts on Gmail filtering

Gmail has some extremely complex filters. They’re machine learning based and measure hundreds of things about incoming mail. The filters are continually adjusting to changes and updating how they treat specific mail.
One consequence of continually adjusting machine learning filters is that filtering is not static. What passes to the inbox now, may not pass in a couple hours.
One of the other challenges with Gmail filters is that they look at all the mail mentioning a particular domain and so affiliate mail and 3rd party mail can affect delivery of corporate mail.
The good news is that continually adjusting filters adapt to positive changes as well as negative ones. In fact, I recently made a segmentation suggestion to a client and they saw a significant increase in inbox delivery at Gmail the next day.
Gmail can be a challenge for delivery, but send mail users want and mail does go to the inbox.

You can't always get what you want

It’s a problem anyone who has done any delivery work has faced. There’s a client who is having blocklist problems or ISP delivery problems and they won’t pay any attention to what you say. They insist that you talk to the blocklist or the ISP or hand over contacts directly so they can “dialog with” someone internally. They don’t like what they’re hearing, and they hope that the answer will be different if they find a new person to talk to.
The reality is many of the people at ISPs and blocklists don’t want to talk to these types of senders. They may answer a friendly question from someone they know and trust, but sometimes not even then.
Some very large ISPs and major blocklists don’t even take sender questions. They won’t communicate with anyone about any delivery issues.
I’ve had to tell more than a few clients recently that various ISPs and blocklists weren’t interested in helping those clients with their delivery problems. There are two classes of reactions I get from clients. Some clients focus on moving forward. “OK, now what? How can we identify the issue, what data do we have and how can we figure out what the problem is?”
Other clients continue to look for ways to talk to whomever is blocking their mail. They’re convinced if they can just “explain their business model” or be told what they’re doing wrong, that all their delivery problems will magically disappear.
Needless to say those clients who focus on moving forward and looking at the information they do have have much better success resolving their delivery problems. What many senders don’t understand is the wealth of data they have that will help them resolve the issue. And even if they know it’s buried in their files, they don’t always know where to start looking or even what they’re looking for.
But that is, of course, why you hire someone like me who understands spamfiltering and email. I help senders understand how email filters work and identify what parts of their programs are likely to be responsible for delivery issues. I often find the most valuable service I provide to clients is a fresh set of eyes that can see the forest. With my help, they manage to stop obsessing unproductively about one particular symptom and focus on the underlying problems.
Senders who think the holy grail of problem resolution is speaking to the right person at an ISP or blocklist generally are disappointed, even when they hire someone who knows all the right people at the ISPs. They can’t always get what they want. But I can often help them get what they need.