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.

Microsoft and SPF
Opting out of “service” messages

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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?

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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.

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Are seed lists still relevant?

Those of you who have seen some of my talks have seen this model of email delivery before. The concept is that there are a host of factors that contribute to the reputation of a particular email, but that at many ISPs the email reputation is only one factor in email delivery. Recipient preferences drive whether an email ends up in the bulk folder or the inbox.

The individual recipient preferences can be explicit or implicit. Users who add a sender to their address book, or block a sender, or create a specific filter for an email are stating an explicit preference. Additionally, ISPs monitor some user behavior to determine how wanted an email is. A recipient who moves an email from the bulk folder to the inbox is stating a preference. A person who hits “this-is-spam” is stating a preference. Other actions are also measured to give a user specific reputation for a mail.
Seed accounts aren’t like normal accounts. They don’t send mail ever. They only download it. They don’t ever dig anything out of the junk folder, they never hit this is spam. They are different than a user account – and ISPs can track this.
This tells us we have to take inbox monitoring tools with a grain of salt. I believe, though, they’re still valuable tools in the deliverability arsenal. The best use of these tools is monitoring for changes. If seed lists show less than 100% inbox, but response rates are good, then it’s unlikely the seed boxes are correctly reporting delivery to actual recipients. But if seed lists show 100% inbox and then change and go down, then that’s the time to start looking harder at the overall program.
The other time seed lists are useful is when troubleshooting delivery. It’s nice to be able to see if changes are making a difference in delivery. Again, the results aren’t 100% accurate but they are the best we have right now.
 

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