More on Yahoo and Engagement

A friend of the blog contacted me earlier today and pointed out that the news that Dan posted about Yahoo and engagement that I blogged about last week was actually reported by George Bilbrey in a Mediapost article on August 1.

We’d contacted Yahoo about a number of sender issues since seeing inbox placement rates drop by roughly 3% this summer, and poor user response was cited as a cause of bulking. More recently, the company warned that as it improves its ability to analyze behavior to determine what users want delivered to their inboxes, some senders — even responsible mailers — may face deliverability challenges. When Engagement Began to Matter

My apologies to the fine folks at Return Path, especially Christine and Melinda who did all the hard work, for missing their initial report on this.

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Wiretapping and email

An Alabama resident is suing Yahoo for violating the California wiretapping law. Specifically he’s suing under CA Penal Code section 631. The thing is, this section of the law deals with wiretapping over “telephone or telegraph” wires. That doesn’t seem to apply in this case as Yahoo isn’t using either telephone or telegraph wires to transmit their packets.
Holomaxx tried the wiretapping argument when they sued Yahoo and Hotmail. That case cited a cause of action under both federal law and California law. The wiretapping claim was addressed specifically by the lawyers for the defendants.

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Engagement based delivery makes testing tricky

Yesterday I wrote about how important recipients are to achieving good delivery. The short version of yesterday’s post is that delivery is all about engagement, and how the ISPs were really focusing on engagement and proving custom user experiences.
This is great, for the user. Take the common example where a commercial list has some highly engaged recipients and a bunch of recipients that can take or leave the mail. The ISP delivers the newsletter into the inbox of the highly engaged recipients and leaves it in the bulk folder of less engaged recipients.
With user focused delivery people get the mail they are interested in where they can read it and interact it. People who have demonstrated a lack of interest for a topic or a sender don’t see that mail.
This can get complicated for those of us trying to troubleshoot deliver problems, though. I have a couple mail accounts I use for testing at various ISPs. Even though I do very little to try and personalize the account I am seeing behaviour that leads me to wonder if ISP personalizing the inbox experience is going to make it that much more difficult to troubleshoot delivery issues.
I have to wonder, too, where this leaves delivery monitoring services in the future. If delivery is personalized, how can you know that the delivery monitoring addresses are representative any longer? Is there even a “representative” mailbox any longer?

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Yahoo looking harder at engagement

In a post this morning, Dan Deneweth from Responsys says he’s received confirmation from Yahoo that they have increased the value of engagement metrics when making delivery decisions.
The really great thing, for the ISPs, about engagement metrics is that they directly measure how much a particular email is wanted by recipients. There’s no guessing about it, it measures how engaged the recipient is with a mail. Even better is the fact that, unlike proxy metrics, engagement metrics are extremely difficult for the sender to manipulate. As a sender I can artificially lower complaints and bounces without improving the mail I’m sending. But I can’t improve engagement metrics without actually engaging my recipients.
As I wrote back in 2010:

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