Schroedinger’s email

The riskiest email to send is that very first email. It’s a blank slate. Even if you’re sending confirmation messages, you don’t really know anything about how this email is going to affect your reputation.

It’s Schroedinger’s email. The address is both good and bad, until you send to it.

If it’s good, great things will happen. You’ll be happy. The recipient will be happy. Deliverability will increase. Everything is awesome.

But if it’s not good, there are a whole host of consequences to sending that email. The obvious problems are hitting spamtraps, bouncing mail and complaints with the resulting delivery problems and, in very bad case, spamfoldering and blocklisting. Sure, you can use a data hygiene to lower the chances of the mail bouncing. But hygiene services don’t help you if the address is deliverable but belongs to someone else. They certainly don’t help if the address is a spamtrap.

There are all sorts of ways to mitigate damage from bad email addresses, after you know for certain they’re bad email addresses. But that first email is still risky. Even sending a confirmation email (double opt-in) can cause delivery problems at some places. That’s especially true for signups where you might want to send confirmation emails like sweepstakes or political mail.

The obvious answer is to segregate all confirmation emails onto their own IP with their own DKIM signature and, if you’re really worried, it’s own domains and everything. The problem there is that if your mail is messy enough, you may generate a bad reputation on it and your confirmation emails will go to bulk.

You may want to consider, then, just mixing in the confirmation emails with your regular mailstream and letting the good reputation carry the new messages. That may work depending on the relative volumes and the quality of the subscription feed.

Another way to handle it is to segregate the confirmation messages on an IP with other transactional and triggered emails like password resets, 2FA emails and purchase receipts. If you have a transactional feed, this is the best way to handle this mail. Most of the other emails are heavily engaged with, but come at irregular intervals. This mimics the confirmation emails and lets all that stream develop a reputation outside of the reputation of regular bulk mail.

All in all, there’s no one way to manage confirmation emails for a signup stream. There’s always going to be risk to mailing that unknown email. We’re already seeing filters able to sort out different mail types when they’re from the same IPs with the same authentication. Google and Oath are good at that already.

My best advice is to lump it in with the other transactional email. That’s what it is, that’s what it looks like. If you only have a single IP, then I’d advise authenticating transactional mail, including confirmation mail, differently from marketing and bulk mail. That way the filters can distinguish between the two streams. While some reputation will be shared between the different kinds of mail, the filters will be able to distinguish between them. As such the confirmation emails will be less likely to harm your overall delivery.

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Confirming addresses for transactional mail

A colleague was asking about confirming transactional mail today. It seems a couple of big retailers got SBLed today for sending receipts to spamtraps. I talked a few weeks ago about why it’s important to let people unsubscribe from transactional email, and many of those same things apply to confirming receipts.

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Don't leave that money sitting there

The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts.
I’m probably the first to admit that confirmed opt-in isn’t the solution to all your delivery problems. There are situations where it’s a good idea, there are times when it’s not. There are situations where you absolutely need that extra step involved and there are times when that extra step is just superfluous.
But whether a sender uses confirmed opt in or not they must do something to confirm that the email address actually belongs to their customer. It’s so easy to have data errors in email addresses that there needs to be some sort of error correction process involved.
Senders that don’t do this are leaving money on the table. They’re not taking that extra step to make sure the data they were given is correct. They don’t make any effort to draw a direct line between the email address entered into their web form or given to them at the register or used for a receipt, and their actual customer.
It does happen, it happens enough to make the non-tech press. Consumerist has multiple articles a month on some email address holder that can’t get a giant company to stop mailing them information about someone else’s account.
Just this week, the New Yorker published an article about a long abandoned gmail address that received over 4000 “legitimate” commercial and transactional emails.

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Unsubscribe means unsubscribe

But, unfortunately, some senders don’t actually think unsubscribe means stop sending mail.
Today, for instance, the nice folks at The Container Store sent me an email with an “important update to my POP! account”

Yes, that’s an address I gave them. But I don’t have any record of setting up an account. I was on their mailing list for all of 4 emails back in November 2016 before unsubscribing. But, they’ve decided they can email me despite my unsubscribe request.
They’ve cloaked this as an “Important Account Update” about some account I don’t have. In fact, when I go to their website and try and see what this oh so important account is about they tell me:


I understand legitimate account notifications might be an acceptable excuse to send mail even after the recipient opted out. This, however, was done extremely poorly. There is no record of the account that they are sending me information about. Neither the company nor I have any record of this account of mine.
At a minimum the emails should have only be sent to the folks that actually had an account. But, they weren’t.
I also have some issues with a company requiring recipients to accept email in order to continue using reward points. As a recipient, if I wanted what they were offering I might go ahead and continue receiving emails. But, I might not. It would all depend on how aggressive their email program is and how good the rewards are. As a deliverability consultant, this strikes me as a great way to create a mailing list full of unengaged users. Unengaged users lead to spam foldering and eventual failure of an email marketing program.
Whatever some executives think, and having been in this industry for a decade and I half I’m sure this is coming from the top down, this is not a good way to build an email program. You really can’t force folks to accept your email. ISPs are too protective of their users to make that a viable strategy.

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