Having the same conversation

This morning I was reading a blog post about the failure of the congressional super committee. The author commented

parties can’t reach an agreement if they’re not even having the same conversation.

I realized this is just as true in email as it is in politics. All too often we’re not having the same conversation. Look at the comments thread on my spamtraps post. Steve Henderson and I weren’t having the same conversation. He believes spam is illegal and that identifying email as spam is the same as calling the sender a criminal. I don’t think spam is illegal and am not making any comments about the legal status of the sender.
This is one recent example, but it’s not an unique occurrence. Failing to have the same conversation is rampant in the email space. One of the more obvious situations where this happens is when dealing with blocks.
The blocked sender tells the blocking recipient, “We don’t send spam! Remove the block, please!” The sender thinks this is the relevant bit of information and that all they need to do is assert that they aren’t intentionally sending spam.
The blocking recipient looks at their systems, they look at their customer data, they look at the patter of email and say, “We can’t remove this block.” The receiver thinks this is the relevant bit of information. They work on data, not intentions.
I frequently describe my job as translating from sender to receiver. I sit in the middle of the conversation and make sure both sides are having the same conversation.
In politics and in email delivery, the only way things get done is when both sides have the same conversation. Understanding the goals and perspectives of the “the other side” is critical to getting what you want.

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Rescuing reputation

One of the more challenging things I do is work with companies who have poor reputations that they’re trying to repair. These companies have been getting by with poor practices for a while, but finally the daily delivery falls below their pain threshold and they decide they need to fix things.
That’s when they call me in, usually asking me if I can go to the ISPs and tell the ISPs that they’re not spammers, they’re doing everything right and will the ISP please stop unfairly blocking them. Usually I will agree to talk to the ISPs, if fixing the underlying problems doesn’t improve their delivery on its own. But before we can talk to the ISPs, we have to try to fix things and at least have some visible changes in behavior to take to them. Once they have externally visible changes, then we can ask the ISPs for a little slack.
With these clients there isn’t just one thing they’ve done to create their bad reputation. Often nothing they’re doing is really evil, it’s just a combination of sorta-bad practices that makes their overall reputation really bad. The struggle is fixing the reputation requires more than one change and no single change is going to necessarily make an immediate improvement on their reputation.
This is a struggle for the customer, because they have to start thinking about email differently. Things have to be done differently from how they’ve always been done. This is a struggle for me because I can’t guarantee if they do this one thing that it will have improved delivery. I can’t guarantee that any one thing will fix their delivery, because ISPs measure and weight dozens of things as part of their delivery making decisions. But what I can guarantee is that if they make the small improvements I recommend then their overall reputation and delivery will improve.
What small improvement have you made today?

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State of the Industry

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a series of posts on the blog from various authors who are active in the email space.
I posted A very young industry commenting on the lack of experience among email marketers. I think that some of the conflict between ISPs and ESPs and receivers and marketers can be traced back to this lack of longevity and experience. Often there is only a single delivery expert at a company. These people often have delivery responsibilities dropped on them without any real training or warning. They have to rely on outside resources to figure out how to do their job and often that means leaning on ISPs for training.
JD Falk described how many at ISPs feel about this in his post With great wisdom…

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Delivery problems are not all spam related

Not every delivery failure is due to poor reputation or spam. Sometimes ISPs just have problems on their mailservers and so mail doesn’t get through. It’s often hard for delivery experts (and their bosses and their customers and their clients) to watch email delays or rejections without being able to do anything about it.
Sometimes, though, there is nothing to do. The rejections are because something broke at the ISP and they have to sort through it. Just this week there’s been a lot of twitter traffic about problems at a major cable company. They are rate limiting senders with very good reputations. They have admitted there is a problem, but they don’t have a fix or an ETA. From what I’ve heard it they’re working with their hardware vendor to fix the problem.
Hardware breaks and backhoes eat fiber. Yes, ISPs should (and all of the large ones do) have backups and redundancies. But those backups and redundancies can’t always handle the firehose worth of mail coming to the ISPs. As a result, the ISPs start rejecting some percentage of mail from everyone. Yahoo even has a specific error message to distinguish between “we’re blocking just you” from “we’re shedding load and temp failing everyone.”

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