Related Posts

Return Path on Content Filtering

Return Path have an interesting post up about content filtering. I like the model of 3 different kinds of filters, in fact it’s one I’ve been using with clients for over 18 months. Spamfiltering isn’t really about one number or one filter result, it’s a complex interaction of lots of different heuristics designed to answer the question: do recipients want this kind of mail?

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Delivery and marketing, another view

In addition to posting some of my thoughts about how delivery and marketing have different and possible contradictory constraints, I asked folks on the Only Influencers list what they thought. They had some different perspectives, primarily being marketers. One person even welcomed me to the dark side.
The general response from the marketing side of things appeared to be that ISPs need to stop actually filtering marketing email. That would resolve the problems from the marketers perspective. I don’t necessarily think that will help. I believe if marketers had unfettered access to the inbox, most inboxes would be totally un-useable.
My thinking triggered other folks to consider delivery and marketing and what drives both. George Bilbrey, from Return Path, posted an article in Mediapost looking at why good delivery is an important part of a good marketing strategy.
George points out many marketers really do act as if delivery is separate and detrimental to good marketing.

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Twisting information around

One of my mailing lists was asking questions today about an increase in invitation mailings from Spotify. I’d heard about them recently, so I started digging through my mailbox to see if I’d received one of these invites. I hadn’t, but it clued me into a blog post from early this year that I hadn’t seen before.
Research: ESPs might get you blacklisted.
That article is full of FUD, and the author quite clearly doesn’t understand what the data he is relying on means. He also doesn’t provide us with enough information that we can repeat what he did.
But I think his take on the publicly available data is common. There are a lot of people who don’t quite understand what the public data means or how it is collected. We can use his post as a starting off point for understanding what publicly available data tells us.
The author chooses 7 different commercial mailers as his examples. He claims the data on these senders will let us evaluate ESPs, but these aren’t ESPs. At best they’re ESP customers, but we don’t know that for sure. He claims that shared IPs means shared reputation, which is true. But he doesn’t claim that these are shared IPs. In fact, I would bet my own reputation on Pizza Hut having dedicated IP addresses.
The author chooses 4 different publicly available reputation services to check the “marketing emails” against. I am assuming he means he checked the sending IP addresses because none of these services let you check emails.
He then claims these 4 measures

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