Recent Posts

Thank you, Fred!

I am honored and humbled to be called out as a Goddess of Email Deliverability by Fred Tabsharani in his recent deliverability.com post. He has named and lauded people I am proud to call colleagues and friends. Thank you, Fred.

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SORBS Progress

A little bird tells me that GFI have resolved their primary blocking issue on SORBS problems. If all goes well I’d expect their infrastructure and policies to improve significantly over the next few months. We’ll wait and see whether the data quality begins to improve after that.

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Email without filters

… or Find the False Positive.
Anyone sending a lot of email has complained about spam filters and false positives at some point. But most people haven’t run a mailbox with no spam filters in front of it in recent years, so don’t have much of a feel for what an unfiltered mailbox looks like, how important filters are and how difficult their job is.
I run no transaction level filters in front of my mailbox, just content filters that route mail to one of several inboxes or a junk folder, so if I want to I can look at what unfiltered email looks like. I took data from all mail that was sent to me yesterday, and put it in a format that really shows the problem filters face and especially the difficulty of spotting which mail in the junk folder is a false positive.
An inbox with no filters looks like this.

Running a spam filter against it, simply categorizing each email as spam (pink) or not-spam (green) looks like this.
 

Even with the messages categorized as spam vs not-spam it’s hard to work out which messages are important and which aren’t, let alone where the false positives might be.
If I sort the categories by hand you get this – where you can see that out of 1200 or so mails about three quarters were spam. Of the three false positives two were bulk email that I didn’t care that I didn’t receive and only one was email that I considered important.
 
 

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Industry Jargon

I have a new laptop, so I’m having to teach the spellchecker some words it doesn’t know.
deliverability, unsubscription, MAAWG, DKIM, epending, ESP, smarthost, return-path …
There sure are a lot of words in the email business that outsiders might not recognize or understand.

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It's Wednesday – do you know where your sales staff are?

I received an email yesterday with the subject “Please confirm your lunch reservation”. It didn’t look like a typical spam subject line, but wasn’t from anywhere I recognized.
I take a look.

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Turn it all the way up to 11

I made that joke the other night and most of the folks who heard it didn’t get the reference. It made me feel just a little bit old.
Anyhow, Mickey beat me to it and posted much of what I was going to say about Ken Magill’s response to a very small quote from Neil’s guest post on expiring email headers last week.
I, too, was at that meeting, and at many other meetings where marketers and the folks that run the ISP spam filters end up in the same room. I don’t think the marketers always understand what is happening inside the postmaster and filtering desks on a day to day basis at the ISPs. Legitimate marketing? It’s a small fraction of the mail they deal with. Ken claims that marketing pays the salaries of these employees and they’d be out of a job if marketing didn’t exist. Possibly, but only in the context that they are paid to keep their employers servers up and running so that the giant promises made by the marketing team of faster downloads and better online experiences actually happen.
If there wasn’t an internet and there weren’t servers to maintain, they’d have good jobs elsewhere. They’d be building trains or designing buildings or any of the thousands of other jobs that require smart technical people.
Ken has no idea what these folks running the filters and keeping your email alive deal with on a regular basis. They deal with the utter dregs and horrors of society. They are the people dealing with unrelenting spam and virus and phishing attacks bad enough to threaten to take down their networks and the networks of everyone else. They also end up dealing with law enforcement to deal with criminals. Some of what they do is deal with is unspeakable, abuse and mistreatment of children and animals. These are the folks who stand in front of the rest of us, and make the world better for all of us.
They should be thanked for doing their job, not chastised because they’re doing what the people who pay them expect them to be doing.
Yes, recipients want the mail they want. But, y’know, I bet they really don’t want all the bad stuff that the ISPs protect against. Ken took offense at a statement that he really shouldn’t have. ISPs do check their false positive rates on filtering, and those rates are generally less than 1% of all the email that they filter. Marketers should be glad they’re such a small part of the problem. They really don’t want to be a bigger part.

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Multipart MIME cheat sheet

I’ve had a couple of people ask me about MIME structure recently, especially how you create multipart messages, when you should use them and which variant of multipart you use for different things. (And I’m working on a MIME parser / generator for Abacus at the moment, so it’s all fresh in my mind)
So I’ve put together a quick cheat sheet, showing the structure of four common types of email, and how their MIME structure looks.

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Guaranteed email delivery

Ben over at Mailchimp has a good post about his response (and his support staff’s more professional and helpful response) to inquires asking if Mailchimp can guarantee an improvement in delivery.
I sympathize with Ben, and commend his staff. I often get potential clients asking me if I can guarantee I can get their mail to the inbox or get them off a public or private blocklist. And, the answer really is no, I can’t guarantee anything. Much of delivery is solely in the hands of the actual sender. Sure, ESPs can enforce a certain standard of behaviour and they can do all the technical things right. And consultants like me can tell you how ISP spam filters work and explain how some of your choices and processes affect delivery. But none of us can guarantee inbox delivery.
Only one company has tried to guarantee inbox delivery, and they shut down earlier this year because they were non-viable and couldn’t get enough of a recipient userbase to attract customers.
For the rest of us, though, the best we can do is give senders the tools and information they need to succeed in getting mail delivered to the inbox.

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Evangelizing Permission

Last week the Only Influencers email discussion group tackled this question posed by Ken Magill.

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Permission-ish based marketing

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

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