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

Just go read here…

I wrote earlier this week about bad ways to evaluate and choose an ESP. It was all going to end today in an insightful and profound post telling all of you exactly how to find the best ESP.
Then Smartinsights published an insightful and useful article on choosing an ESP yesterday.
So, yeah, just go read what Jordie has to say. I have a couple other things to add, but I’ll drop those in another post.

Read More

Wildfires and deliverability

A few weeks ago we took a drive down I5 to attend a service at Bakersfield National Cemetery. Amid the acres and acres of almond farms there were patches of black from recent grassfires. Typical but boring California landscape. Wildfires are a hugely destructive but continual threat in California. Growing up on the east coast, I never really understood wildfires. How can acres and acres and square miles just burn?
Having lived in California for almost as long as I lived on the east coast, I understand a bit better. In some ways, I have to. Even living right on the bay, there’s still some risk of fire. Like the grass fire a few miles from here across the street from the FB headquarters a few years ago. Further up the hills, there’s an even bigger risk of fire. Every driver can see the signs and precautions. Fields have plowed firebreaks around the edges. CAL FIRE posts signs alerting the public to the current fire risk status.
Fire Danger
What do wildfires have to do with deliverability?
I associate wildfires and deliverability together because of a radio show I did a few years ago. It was pitched as a “showdown” between marketers and deliverability. I was the representative of deliverability. During the conversation, one of the marketers mentioned that deliverability people were too focused on the worst case scenario. That we spoke like we expected a fire to break out at any moment. His point was that deliverability spent too much time focused on what could happen and not enough time actually just letting marketers send mail.
His overall point was deliverability people should put out the fires, rather than trying to prevent them in the first place.
I thought about that conversation during the long drive down I5 the other day. I saw the firebreaks plowed into fields at the side of the road. And I saw the patches of blackness from fires reach along the highway where there were no firebreaks.
There are a group of marketers who really hate the entire concept of deliverability. Their point of view is that deliverability is hampering their ability to make money. I’ve even heard some of them assert they don’t care if 70% of their mail goes to the bulk folder. They should be allowed to send blasts of mail and deliverability shouldn’t tell them what they can do. Deliverability, so the complaint goes, is simply out to hurt marketers.
The only good deliverability is that which gets them unblocked when their behavior triggers IP based blocks. When the field is burning down, they’d like us to come spray water on it. And then go away and let them keep throwing lit cigarettes out their car windows.
But that’s not all that firefighting is about. Much of the work is preventing fires in the first place.  In the US, a lot of that work is done through building codes. There are mandates like smoke detectors, fuel free spaces around dwellings, and sprinklers for some buildings. Monitoring local conditions and enforcing burn bans are also a large part of what the fire service does.
I like the fire fighter motif a lot. Much of what deliverability does is actually about preventing the block. ESPs have building code like standards for what mail is good and what is bad and what can be sent on their networks. Many of us publicly speak and educate about good practices and preventing blocks in the first place.
Fire prevention is about risk management and understanding how little things add up. Deliverability is similar. All the little things senders do to improve their deliverability adds up to a lower risk of fire. Yes, things like listbombing happen where even the best deliverability advice wouldn’t have prevented it. But, overall, deliverability wants to help senders get their mail in front of the people who can act on it. Some of that advice, though, takes the form of risk management and saying no.

Read More