Recent Posts

Happy International Women's Day

It’s International Women’s Day, and I thought I’d take a moment to mention some of the many, many women who have inspired me and helped me along the way. Some of them work in deliverability and compliance. Others are business colleagues. Still others are cheerleaders and inspiration. All of them make the world a better place.

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What does good IP Reputation get you?

Today I was discussing some mailing list posts with an ESP colleague. He was telling me some interesting numbers he’d collected from different IP pools they maintain. He was testing routing mail through IPs based on subscription process and routing based on engagement metrics. The data showed that inboxing rates were similar across the test groups. As he put it, “IP reputation didn’t have much impact on inbox delivery.”

I’m not surprised. I’ve been talking for a while about how IP reputation is less important in reaching the inbox. In fact, it was almost 5 years ago now that I wrote The Death of IP Based Reputation. I updated it in 2015 with Deliverability and IP Reputation. Overall, IP reputation is a much smaller piece of reaching the inbox now than it has been in the past. I’ve talked about the reasons for this in the above posts. The short version is:

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And… we're back

There was an unexpected break in blogging over the last 2 weeks. Between M3AAWG, a week of house guests and some upcoming big changes I didn’t get much writing finished. I started, and am still working on, about half a dozen different posts.
Thanks for your patience, we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled writing soon.
 
 

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2017 Deliverability Benchmark report

Return Path has released their 2017 Deliverability Benchmark Report. I haven’t had a chance to look at it, but did download it earlier today.
EContent has a summary of the article up, with the headline Research Finds Email Senders with Strong Subscriber Engagement Are Likely to See Less Email Delivered to Spam. Useful data points they pulled out include:

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Lack of blogging, in 3 images



 

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Metric Monetization

As a digital channel, email provides a lot of different metrics for marketers to use. Not only can marketers measure things like open and click rates, but they can tie these numbers back to a particular recipient. This treasure trove of information leads to obsessing over making the numbers look good. For good deliverability senders want low bounce rates, low spamtrap rates, and high engagement rates.
These metrics are important because they’re some of the things that filters look at when making delivery decisions. We care about this data because the receiver ISPs care about the data. The ISPs care about this data because they are characteristics of wanted and/or opt in email.

Over the past few years a number of companies sell services selling good metrics.

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Spring in San Francisco

And, of course, that means M3AAWG is coming to town. I’m speaking on two panels this conference and will be around starting mid-day Monday. Of course, half the fun of M3AAWG is watching the swarms of posts on Facebook of friends traveling to wherever.
Those of you visiting, weather is nice. Sadly (as we’re heading back into drought) we’re not expecting rain next week. And, we’re back up at the top of the hill – across the street at the Fairmont.
Looking forward to seeing everyone.

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Another day… another shooting

The importance of email fades when there is yet another school shooting in the US. I cannot fathom the depth of grief and sorry for the parents who lost their children today. It is an utter tragedy that we, as a country, continue to accept dead children as an acceptable price to pay for the second amendment.
I am a graduate of Virginia Tech. I went to class in the building that is no longer there because of that shooting. I shared a major with the first student the killer shot. I had a horrible realization a few years ago that shooting, once the worst mass shooting in US history, was no longer even in the top 3. I’m sure now it’s not in the top 5.
Yes, I could write another post about reaching the inbox. I could announce a new change at an ISP. But, in the face of what happened today, I can’t. Someone shot up a school. Another community is in mourning for their children. Our leaders in Congress offer thoughts and prayers and nothing else. This is the country the NRA has purchased.
“It’s too soon” to talk about gun control. “We shouldn’t react hastily” in response. We can’t travel on a plane with a full size bottle of shampoo and without taking our shoes off because of one man. But let’s not react hastily to another school with dead kids.
I do try and keep politics off this blog, I know how divisive politics is in the US these days.
But that I’m happy because a tragedy that I had a marginal association with is no longer even in the top 5 largest shootings is horrifying to me. How normalized has students, kids, babies getting shot become that I react so inappropriately? Way too normalized.
It’s Valentines day. A day we’re supposed to spend with our loved ones celebrating each other. Yet so many families are, instead, mourning their children or holding vigil in the hospital.
America should be better than this. I thought America was better than this. But I was so wrong. We can BE better that this, but we’re not living up to our ideals.
One of my favorite West Wing quotes (and, oh, there are many) starts:

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Following CAN SPAM isn't enough to reach the inbox

One of the top entries on the list of things deliverability folks hear all the time is, “But my mail is all CAN SPAM compliant!” The thing is… no one handling inbound mail really cares. Seriously. CAN SPAM is a law that is little more than don’t lie, don’t hide, and heed the no. Even more importantly, the law itself states that there is no obligation for ISPs to deliver CAN SPAM compliant mail.

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Did the algorithm change?

When faced with unexplained deliverability changes one of the first questions many folks ask is “Did the algorithm change.” In many ways this is an meaningless question. Why? Because there are two obvious answers to the question.
A1: Of course it didn’t.
A2: Of course it did.
Both answers are correct, but they’re answering different underlying questions. When we understand how two diametrically opposed answers are both correct, we understand much more about filtering.

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