Let’s Talk: Reputation

The next 3 or 4 Let’s Talk sessions are going to be all about reputation. We’ll start with a general overview of reputation and identity, then move on to specific kinds of reputation (IP, domain, URL, content), then we’ll talk about how to create, maintain and repair reputation. Still working on the outline, but I’m pretty convinced this will be at least 3 sessions.

Let’s Talk Reputation: July 15, July 29 and August 12. 4pm GMT, noon eastern, 9am pacific.

As everything is taking longer the days, the signup page still isn’t finished. We’re still doing this manually so send me an email to laura-ddiscuss at the obvious domain and I’ll get you an invite.

Invites go out the Monday before the call.

Let’s Talk: Engagement part 2
Let’s Talk: August vacation

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Re-adding subscribers after reputation repair

A comment came in on Engagement and Deliverability and I thought it was a good question and deserved a discussion.

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Delivery challenges increasing

Return Path published their most recent Global Deliverability report this morning. (Get the Report) This shows that inbox placement of mail has decreased 6% in the second half of 2011. This decrease is the largest decrease Return Path has seen in their years of doing this report.
To be honest, I’m not surprised at the decrease. Filters are getting more sophisticated. This means they’re not relying on simply IP reputation for inbox delivery any longer. IP reputation gets mail through the SMTP transaction, but after that mail is subject to content filters. Those content filters are getting a lot better at sorting out “wanted” from “unwanted” mail.
I’m also hearing a lot of anecdotal reports that bulk folder placements at a couple large ISPs increased in the first quarter of 2012. This is after the RP study was finished, and tells me increased bulk folder placement is more likely to be a trend and not a blip.
One of the other interesting things from the RP study is that the differences are not across all mail streams, but are concentrated in certain streams and they vary across different regions.

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Filtering by gestalt

One of those $5.00 words I learned in the lab was gestalt. We were studying fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and, at the time, there were no consistent measurements or numbers that would drive a diagnosis of FAS. Diagnosis was by gestalt – that is by the patient looking like someone who had FAS.
It’s a funny word to say, it’s a funny word to hear. But it’s a useful term to describe the future of spam filtering. And I think we need to get used to thinking about filtering acting on more than just the individual parts of an email.

Filtering is not just IP reputation or domain reputation. It’s about the whole message. It’s mail from this IP with this authentication containing these URLs.  Earlier this year, I wrote an article about Gmail filtering. The quote demonstrates the sum of the parts, but I didn’t really call it out at the time.

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