What matters for reputation?

There is a contingent of senders and companies that seems to believe that receiver ISPs and filtering companies aren’t measuring reputation correctly. Over and over again the discussion comes up where senders think they can improve on how reputation is measured.
One factor that is continually repeated is the size of the company. I’ve even seen a couple people suggest that corporate net worth should be included in the reputation calculation.
The problem with this suggestion is that just because a company is big or has a high net worth or is on the Fortune500 doesn’t mean that the mail they send isn’t spam. I’ve certainly received spam from large, name brand companies (and organizations). I’ve also consulted with a number of those companies who bought or appended a list and then had to deal with the fallout from a Spamhaus listing or upstream disconnection.
Sure, there is a certain logic to company size and prominence being a part of a reputation calculation. For instance, my experience suggests consumers who recognize a brand are less likely to treat mail as “spam” even if they didn’t sign up for the mail in the first place. Certainly there are large brands (Kraft, FTDDirect, 1-800–Flowers, OfficeDepot) that have been caught sending mail to people who never opted in to their lists.
Many people don’t realize that company size and prominence are already factored into the reputation scores. No ISPs don’t look at a mail and, if it’s authenticated, add in a little positive because it’s part of a giant, name brand company. Rather, the recipients change how they interact with the mail. Even recipients who didn’t sign for mail from Office Depot may click through and purchase from an offer. Some recipients recognizing the brand will hit delete instead of “this is spam.”
All of these things mean that big brands have recognition that takes into account that they are prominent brands. Elaborate processes and extra reputation points given to big brands don’t need to happen, they’re already an innate part of the system.
 

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Email marketing ulcers for the holiday

I’ve mentioned here before that I can usually tell when the big ISPs are making changes to their spam filtering as that ISP dominates my discussions with current and potential clients and many discussions on delivery mailing lists.
The last two weeks the culprit has been Yahoo. They seem to be making a lot of changes to their filtering schemes right at the busiest email marketing time of the year. Senders are increasing their volume trying to extract that last little bit of cash out of holiday shoppers, but they’re seeing unpredictable delivery results. What worked to get mail into the inbox a month ago isn’t working, or isn’t working as well, now.
Some of this could be holiday volume related. Many marketers have drastically increased their mail volume over the last few weeks. But I don’t think the whole issue is simply that there is more email marketing flowing into our mailboxes.
As I’ve been talking with folks, I have started to see a pattern and have some ideas of what may be happening. It seems a lot of the issue revolves around bulk foldering. Getting mail accepted by the MXs seems to be no different than it has been. The change seems to be based on the reputation of the URLs and domains in the email.
Have a domain with a poor reputation? Bulk. Have a URL seen in mail people aren’t interested in? Bulk. Have a URL pointing to a website with problematic content? Bulk.
In the past IPs that were whitelisted or had very good reputations could improve delivery of email with neutral or even borderline poor reputations. It seems that is no longer an effect senders can rely on. It may even be that Yahoo, and other ISPs, are going to start splitting IP reputation from content reputation. IP reputation is critical for getting mail in the door, and without a good IP reputation you’ll see slow delivery. But once the mail has been accepted, there’s a whole other level of filtering, most of it on the content and generally unaffected by the IP reputation.
I don’t think the changes are going to go away any time soon. I think they may be refined, but I do think that reputation on email content (particularly domains and URLs and target IP addresses) is going to play a bigger and bigger role in email delivery.
What, specifically, is going to happen at Yahoo? Only they can tell you and I’m not sure I have enough of a feel for the pattern to speculate about the future. I do think that it’s going to take a few weeks for things to settle down and be consistent enough that we can start to poke the black box and map how it works.

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When consulting with clients, I spend a lot of time trying to help them better understand the concept of sender reputation. Spam reports, feedback loops, and other data that comes from a collection of positive and negative reputational feedback about a company sending email.
Certainly, the “This is not spam” action – moving an email from the spam folder to the inbox, or clicking the “not spam” button in a web mail’s interface, is a strong positive reputational action. Some webmail providers use this data to decide which bulked senders deserve being let out of the penalty box – which should have their mail once again delivered to the inbox.
A client recently theorized that a great solution to their delivery problems would be to do this “en masse.” Sign up for hundreds or thousands of webmail accounts, send my mail to them, and click on the “not spam” button for each of my own emails. That’ll greatly improve my sending reputation, right?
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As for Hotmail – what would Hotmail do? Ask Boris Mizhen. Microsoft is currently suing him, alleging that he and/or his agents or associates engaged in this very practice.

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