Details matter

I field a lot of delivery questions on various online fora. Often people try and anonymise what they’re asking about by abstracting out the question. The problem is that there are very few answers we can give in the abstract.

Outline of a head with a gear inside it.

What are some examples of these types of questions?

  • Should you always remove an address that hard bounces? Well, in general, yes. But there are a small number of cases where the hard bounce is a mistake on the part of the receiver and you shouldn’t remove that address.
  • Should you send email to recipients who haven’t engaged in 3 years. Well, in general, no. But I’ve seen and managed campaigns to recipients much older than that. What are you really trying to do?
  • If we limit our sending to people who’ve opted in to email, we’ll solve our spamtrap problem, right? Well, first, why do you think you have a spamtrap problem? If you’re Spamhaus listed, there’s a lot more you need to do. If you’re seeing one or two traps at the commercial sensor networks, then what’s your overall deliverability look like?
  • Why would our mail suddenly start to go to bulk? Overall, it wouldn’t. What did you change? Did your website get compromised? Have you linked to a new image server? Did you publish a DMARC record? Did you mention a domain with a bad reputation?
  • If we change the from address of our mail will it affect our deliverability? It can, but what from domain you’re talking about, what you’re changing it from and what you’re changing it to all matter before anyone can actually answer the question.

Deliverability is not a science. There are no hard and fast rules. Even the rules I wish were true, like only send opt-in mail, aren’t really hard and fast. A lot of folks get decent delivery using purchased or otherwise non-opt-in lists. I don’t like it, but I acknowledge it.

In order to get good deliverability advice for a situation the full situation needs to be described. History, specifics, IPs, and domains all matter. Where your email addresses came from and how you’ve maintained your database matters. It all matters. Abstracting out a question just means you get an abstract and generic answer, and that doesn’t help anyone.

Related Posts

Confirmed opt-in

I spent the morning in multiple venues correcting mis-understandings of confirmed opt-in. The misunderstandings weren’t so much that people didn’t understand how COI works, but more they didn’t understand all the implications.
In one venue, the conversation centered around how small a portion of deliverability the initial subscription process affects. Sure, sending unwanted, unexpected email can and does cause reputation problems, but merely using COI as a subscription methodolgy doesn’t automatically give a sender a good reputation or good delivery. Senders using COI as a subscription practice need to also need to send relevant and engaging mail that their recipients expect to receive. They need to handle their bounces well and purge or re-engage inactive subscribers. They need to keep their complaints low and their responses high.
How you manage subscriptions is only one factor in reputation schemes, and even if the subscription method is COI other factors can negate any bonus involved.
The second conversation involved Ken challenging me on the comment I left on his quiz yesterday. I said COI wasn’t foolproof and he challenged me to explain how. I did, and he’ll be following up next week.

Read More

Permission-ish based marketing

My Mum flew in to visit last week, and over dinner one evening the talk turned to email.

Read More

Looking towards the future

I had the opportunity to go to a seminar and networking event hosted by Return Path yesterday evening. The topic was “Email trends in 2012” and it was presented by Tom Sather.
If any of you get the opportunity to go to a talk presented by any of the Return Path folks I encourage you to do so. They know their stuff and their presentations are full of good information.
One of the trends mentioned is the increase in reliance on domain reputation. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. I wrote a little bit about it recently, but have focused more on the whole realm of content filtering rather than just domain reputation.
Domain reputation is where delivery is going. And I think a lot of senders are going to struggle with delivery as they find that IP reputation is not enough to get into the inbox.
 

Read More