Marking mail as spam says what?

I wear a number of hats and have a lot of different email addresses. I like to keep the different email addresses separate from each other, “don’t cross the streams” as it were.

 

Recently I’ve been getting spam to my womenofemail.org address asking about the wordtothewise.com website.

I’m not sure where Ms. Catherine Metcalf bought my Women of Email address or how she connected it with a post written by Steve here on the WttW website. But it did bring up an interesting question I don’t necessarily have an answer to.

A little background. Women of Email hosts email on G Suite. Unlike most of my accounts, my “this is spam” reports actually are measured for reputation purposes. I can report this as spam, Google will take action and I won’t have to see mail from Ms. Metcalf (and ideally bluelabellabs.net) ever again. But then I started thinking. The only URL in the message posts to my website.

My question is: if I click “this is spam” on the above message will Google knock my reputation? How much mail is sent to Google on any given day mentioning WttW links and websites?

This is, of course, a question that proves I’m a little too focused on reputation. No normal person would consider whether or not to report this as spam. They’d just hit this is spam and assume it will only hurt the sender’s reputation, not affect the reputation of anything in the message. But I know that every link in a message has its own reputation.

I suspect there wouldn’t be a huge amount of fallout. Gmail looks at every “resource combination” (to use their term) when making decisions. Yes, a t-i-s click is likely to be a minor tick against “wordtothewise.com” in general. But only a minor one. It’s likely to be a bigger tick against mail from catherine.metcalf@bluelabellabs.net that mentions wordtothewise.com.

Looking at the even bigger picture. Google knows that Catherine Metcalf is sending out a lot of mail mentioning different URLs. They have to, she’s using Google to send them. But they can also see that a subset of the recipients delete the mail without opening, or report the message as spam. They probably can even tell that she’s using some sort of automated software to send the mail, rather than typing each message herself. If enough people report the message as spam, Google is smart enough to spam folder her mail. Given they’re handling her outgoing messages, it would be nice if they could block it on the outbound, but we can’t have everything.

 

 

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The email solicitation that made me vow to never work with this company again. When sending unsolicited email, you never know how the recipient is going to respond. Writing a public blog post calling you out can happen.
The 2016 Sparkies. Sparkpost is looking for nominations for their email marketing awards. Win a trip to Insight 2016!
5 CAN SPAM myths. Send Grid’s General Counsel speaks about CAN SPAM myths. Personally, asking for an email to unsubscribe is annoying. I never know if the unsubscribe request worked or not. Give me a link any day.
The most misunderstood statistic in email marketing. A good discussion of why raw complaint rates isn’t the metric the ISPs use, and how it can mislead folks about their email program.
Office 365 is expanding it’s DKIM signing. Terry Zink discusses the upcoming changes to how Office365 handles DKIM signatures. This is exactly the kind of changes I was talking about in my 2016 predictions post – background changes that are going to affect how we authenticate email. He even specifically calls out whether or not a particular signature is DMARC aligned or not.

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Parasites hurt email marketing

As a small business owner I am a ripe target for many companies. They buy my address from some lead generation firm, or they scrape it off LinkedIn, and they send me a message that pretends to be personalized but isn’t really.
“I looked at your website… we have a list of email addresses to sell you.”
“We offer cold calling services… can I set up a call with you?”
“I have scheduled a meeting tomorrow so I can tell you about our product that will solve all your technical issues and is also a floor wax.”
None of these emails are anything more than spam. They’re fake personalized. There’s no permission. On a good day they’ll have an opt out link. On a normal day they might include an actual name.
These are messages coming to an email address I’ve spent years trying to protect from getting onto mailing lists. I don’t do fishbowls, I’m careful about who I give my card to, I never use it to sign up for anything. And, still, that has all been for naught.
I don’t really blame the senders, I mean I do, they’re the ones that bought my address and then invested in business automation software that sends me regular emails trying to get me to give them a phone number. Or a contact for “the right person at your business to talk to about this great offer that will change your business.”
The real blame lies with the people who pretend that B2B spam is somehow not spam. Who have pivoted their businesses from selling consumer lists to business lists because permission doesn’t matter when it comes to businesses. The real blame lies with companies who sell “marketing automation software” that plugs into their Google Apps account and hijacks their reputation to get to the inbox. The real blame lies with list cleansing companies who sell list buyers a cleansing service that only hides the evidence of spamming.
There are so many parasites in the email space. They take time, energy and resources from large and small businesses, offering them services that seem good, but really are worthless.
The biologically interesting thing about parasites, though, is that they do better if they don’t overwhelm the host system. They have to stay small. They have to stay hidden. They have to not cause too much harm, otherwise the host system will fight back.
Email fights back too. Parasites will find it harder and harder to get mail delivered in any volume as the host system adapts to them. Already if I look in my junk folder, my filters are correctly flagging these messages as spam. And my filters see a very small portion of mail. Filtering companies and the business email hosting systems have a much broader view and much better defenses.
These emails annoy me, but I know that they are a short term problem.  As more and more businesses move to hosted services, like Google Apps and Office365 the permission rules are going to apply to business addresses as well as consumer addresses. The parasites selling products and services to small business owners can’t overwhelm email. The defenses will step in first.
 

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Google Postmaster Tools

Earlier this month Google announced a new set of tools for senders at their Postmaster Tools site. To get into the site you need to login to Google, but they also have a handy support page that doesn’t require a login for folks who want to see what the page is about.
We did register, but don’t send enough mail to get any data back from Google. However, the nice folks at SendGrid were kind enough to share their experiences with me and show me what the site looked like with real data, when I spoke at their recent customer meeting.
Who can register?
Anyone can register for Google Postmaster tools. All you need is the domain authenticated by DKIM (the d= value) or by SPF (the Return Path value).
Who can see data?
Google is only sharing data with trusted domains and only if a minimum volume is sent from those domains. They don’t describe what a trusted domain is, but I expect the criteria include a domain with some history (no brand new domains) and a reasonable track record (some or all of the mail is good).
For ESPs who want to monitor all the mail they send, every mail needs to be signed with a common d= domain. Individual customers that want their own d= can do so. These customers can register for their own access to just their mail.
ESPs that want to do this need to sign with the common key first, and then with the customer’s more selective key.
How does it work?
Google collects data from DKIM and/or SPF authenticated mail, aggregates it and presents it to a Google user that has authenticated the domain.
How do I authenticate?

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