When the inbox isn't the inbox

There was a discussion today on the OI list about email filtering that brought up something I usually don’t mention in delivery discussions. Most email marketers treat the inbox as the holy grail of delivery. Everything about delivery is focused on getting to the magical inbox.
I think, though, that inbox is often just shorthand for “not landing in the bulk or spam folders.”
For some recipients, particularly those of us who get lots of mail, sometimes it’s better to land in a folder rather than the inbox. I have a folder set up, where most of my commercial mail goes. It’s labeled “commercial.” I check it once or twice a day.
This is beneficial to me and to the senders. Why? Because when I check that folder I’m ready to actually look at my commercial mail. I’m looking for those offers.
For someone like me, who does most of their work in their inbox, commercial interruptions are a problem. Commercial mail that ends up in my inbox, which can happen if I’ve been lazy about filters, interrupts me and usually doesn’t get read. But when it’s in my commercial folder? Well, then I can look at it, visit websites and make purchases.
So just remember, it’s not that you want mail in the inbox as much as you want mail somewhere that the recipient will notice it.

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Spamfilters: a marketer's best friend

I was cleaning out my spam folder this afternoon. I try and do it at least once a day, otherwise the volume gets so bad I don’t actually look at the mail I just mark it all as read. I realized, though, that spamfilters are actually a marketer’s best friend.
If there were no spam filters keeping all the crap people get out of their inbox (in my case over 1000 messages a day) then spam would overwhelm even the most dedicated email junkie. I couldn’t do my job without my spam filters, and in fact the recent rash of virus spew is ending up in my inbox and making finding real mail a problem. I do a lot of sorting before mail ever hits my inbox, and I’m still struggling to deal with the couple hundred “your order has shipped!” and “please her tonight!” emails that my local bayesian filters haven’t caught up to, yet.
Today’s stats:
Work inbox: 17 messages
Work spam: 419
95.9% spam
Personal inbox: 40
Personal spam: 975
95.9% spam
Without filters, I couldn’t accurately find that 4.1% of real mail that I get. Without filters, I couldn’t do my job. Without filters, I couldn’t find the real receipts from purchases I actually made. Without filters, I couldn’t read and respond to mail I wanted.
A mailbox overflowing with spam is unuseable, and email marketers should be thankful that providers work so hard to keep spam out. Otherwise, email wouldn’t be useful for anything.

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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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FBox: The sky isn't falling

Having listened to the Facebook announcement this morning, I am even more convinced that emailpocalypse isn’t happening.
Look, despite the fact that companies like Blue Sky Factory think that this means marketers are NEVER EVER going see the inside of an inbox again this isn’t the end of email marketing.
Yes, Facebook email is a messaging platform that marketers are not going to have direct, unlimited and unfettered access to. I have no problem with this. Unfettered access to a messaging platform has been abused by marketers long enough, that I heartily approve of a platform that gives real control back to the recipient.
With that being said, there are a couple blindingly obvious ways to avoid having to give users control of their own inbox.

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