ESPs and deliverability

There’s an ongoing discussion, one I normally avoid, regarding how much impact an ESP has on deliverability. Overall, my opinion is that as long as you have a half way decent ESP they have no impact on deliverability. Then I started writing an email and realised that my thoughts are more complex than that.

Icon of a head with gears and lightbulbs and thoughts floating in a circle.

Here are some excerpts from the email, because in other circumstances I would have just written it as a blog post.

I have dealt with ESP clients in the past who had a collection of customers that were so bad everything mentioning that ESP (even tests from my wttw account to my gmail account that simply contained the domain name of the client) went to bulk. That was a few years ago, though, and the gmail filters have improved and are in some ways even more discerning. I still occasionally find some domain reputations so bad it breaks delivery from one account to another. This is unusual, though, and it never happens overnight.

Of course there are things the ESPs can do that affect all of their client mail. Most of those things involve letting customers get away with bad address collection practices in enough volume that all the customers are considered problematic. If the ESP doesn’t make their customers behave and lets them send whatever they want to whomever they want, then yes, the ESP is going to have problems.

The ESPs with good delivery have extensive and active deliverability and compliance desks. One desk catches customers at the early end of problems, where it’s not enough to actually hurt their delivery but they’re clearly on a path to bad delivery. The other deals with customers who have not taken the initial advice and have continued down the path. What they’ve done is unacceptable and they have to either fix it and get back up to snuff or find a new ESP. 

The bulk of my clients right now are ESPs, or SaaS providers that are ESPs but don’t realize they are. They generally come to me because they’ve not been handling deliverability at all and now much of their customer mail is going to bulk. They didn’t see themselves as ESPs so they didn’t pay any attention to what customers were doing and there as enough grey mail to ruin delivery. The thing is, these folks are often using one of the commercial SMTP by API vendors (all the ones I can think of right now start with S) so I know that all of the actual technical stuff is correctly managed. I also know their overall complaint rates and bounce rates and all the surface stuff are within acceptable parameters, otherwise they’d be turfed off their SMTP provider. 

A lot of senders, and even some of the deliverability folks, haven’t really kept up with how the ISPs are tracking and filtering mail today. In the B2C space IP address is almost irrelevant. In the B2C space IP address gets you through the SMTP transaction. After that it’s (almost) irrelevant for inbox delivery.

This has been true for ages – it’s been 7 or 8 years since I had a Return Path certified client showing me data that their content mail and their advertising mail was delivered differently at Yahoo, despite identical authentication, IP and everything technical. ISP technology has only gotten better in that time. The content, history and mailstream reputation drives where the mail gets delivered much more than most technical factors, assuming a marginal competence in setting up the mailserver or using one of the commercial bulk MTAs.

In my own work don’t really look at IP rep any more – the publicly available IP reputations don’t reflect on delivery like they used to. I mean, I gave up joking about folks confused by delivery problems senderscore was 99 years ago because it was so overdone. Even now, good IP reputation gets you in the front door, it doesn’t get you to the inbox. 

Right now, delivery is challenging. The filtering technology we’ve been modelling for the last decade has changed significantly over the last 18 – 24 months in ways that confound those models. I think we’re in for another year or more of fine tuning before the filters themselves are stable enough to create accurate models. It is a gross oversimplification to blame any one factor for poor delivery. 

Related Posts

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.

Read More

Rescuing reputation

One of the more challenging things I do is work with companies who have poor reputations that they’re trying to repair. These companies have been getting by with poor practices for a while, but finally the daily delivery falls below their pain threshold and they decide they need to fix things.
That’s when they call me in, usually asking me if I can go to the ISPs and tell the ISPs that they’re not spammers, they’re doing everything right and will the ISP please stop unfairly blocking them. Usually I will agree to talk to the ISPs, if fixing the underlying problems doesn’t improve their delivery on its own. But before we can talk to the ISPs, we have to try to fix things and at least have some visible changes in behavior to take to them. Once they have externally visible changes, then we can ask the ISPs for a little slack.
With these clients there isn’t just one thing they’ve done to create their bad reputation. Often nothing they’re doing is really evil, it’s just a combination of sorta-bad practices that makes their overall reputation really bad. The struggle is fixing the reputation requires more than one change and no single change is going to necessarily make an immediate improvement on their reputation.
This is a struggle for the customer, because they have to start thinking about email differently. Things have to be done differently from how they’ve always been done. This is a struggle for me because I can’t guarantee if they do this one thing that it will have improved delivery. I can’t guarantee that any one thing will fix their delivery, because ISPs measure and weight dozens of things as part of their delivery making decisions. But what I can guarantee is that if they make the small improvements I recommend then their overall reputation and delivery will improve.
What small improvement have you made today?

Read More

Email marketing is hard

I’ve watched a couple discussions around the email and anti-spam community recently with a bit of awe. It seems many email marketers are admitting they are powerless to actually implement all the good advice they give to others.
They are admitting they can’t persuade, cajole, influence or pressure their companies to actually follow best practices. Some of the comments public and private comments I’ve heard from various industry leaders:

Read More