Are the new Gmail ads email?

I’ve seen lots of opinions over the last few weeks about whether or not the new ads in the Gmail promotions tab are email or not.

Google is using its latest inbox redesign to stick ads in the holiest of places: Right inside your Gmail inbox. Under the promotions tab — one of three sections in the new tabbed version of Gmail — Google has started sticking ads disguised as emails, as first noticed by Venture Beat’s Ricardo Bilton. See, it’s just right there in the inbox, looking like a regular e-mail. But, it’s an ad: [screenshot elided] The paid-message opens up like a regular e-mail. Only once inside the message, does it give the option to opt-out of that particular ad. Essentially, it’s Google approved junk-mail — like we need more of that. Atlantic Wire says email

[T]hey’re web-based advertisements formatted and presented in such a way as to closely resemble actual e-mail messages, but are otherwise very much like the ones Gmail users are accustomed to seeing to the right and above the inbox. There’s even some evidence to suggest that the new ads employ the same engine as the ordinary Gmail display ads to select and present those that Google deems a viewer is most likely to click. EmailSkinny says not email

It’s visible in your inbox, with a sender and subject line like an email. You can forward it to others as an email, just like an email. You can delete it, just like an email. New ones will arrive, just like email.
The UI for these advertising messages is slightly different from other gmail messages – but the UI for normal email marketers using microformats (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146897?hl=en) is also different at gmail.
That it wasn’t delivered via SMTP isn’t really relevant – historically no email was delivered via SMTP, and even today there’s a lot of email that is delivered over non-SMTP protocols. Steve says email

It doesn’t show up in your inbox by IMAP or Pop, unlike email.
Is not sent by SMTP, unlike email.
A rose by any other name … is still an ad in the chrome.
Neil says not email

Gmail’s new layout doesn’t just keep your inbox organized, it also gives Google the perfect opportunity to send you unsolicited email ads.
Engadget says email

Personally, I was in the “not email, it doesn’t go over SMTP” camp for a while. I even made a rather public statement about that during a conversation about whether or not these were subject to the regulations of CAN SPAM. But, Steve is correct in pointing out that not all email goes over SMTP. In fact, if I mail him that mail doesn’t go over SMTP. I send it from my mail client, it shows up in his inbox, and never does it touch SMTP. Some Gmail to Gmail mail doesn’t touch SMTP either. Clearly SMTP is not a requirement for email.
Most email/not email discussions in the email marketing sphere have focused on the opt-out provision in CAN SPAM and whether or not the ads need to meet that standard. However, the ads do not contain a physical postal address. If Gmail thought they were emails, they would require advertisers to comply with CAN SPAM. So, Gmail doesn’t think they’re email.
Looking through press about the ads, mostly written by non email reporters, the consensus seems to be they are emails. But I’ve not seen any of the non-email press mention the legal implications. Gmail is not treating these like emails and thus are not complying with any of the 3 major provisions of CAN SPAM: there are no headers, there is no postal address, there is no opt-out.
What do you think about the ads? Does Gmail need to comply with CAN SPAM?

Ads in the Gmail Tabbed Inbox
Lavabit shuts down

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Earlier this week Return Path released their quarterly inbox placement benchmark study, and the results aren’t good.
According to this data, 22% of opt-in emails are not making it to the inbox. An interesting note is that 25% of email from social networks never makes it to the inbox. This is a challenge for social networks, but I’m not sure many individuals care. For a lot of people, if they don’t get mail from a social network it doesn’t really matter. They’ll either log into the network and get it, or they’re not really engaged with the network. And, when networks try to increase the amount of mail they send, that can turn into a problem as well.
Overall, the failure of mail to get into the inbox is a problem for senders. The underlying issue is that ISPs want to deliver mail the recipient wants. But much of the email out there, including marketing and social network updates, is mail the recipient is fine with getting, and equally fine with not getting.

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The challenge of Gmail

A lot of my sales inquiries recently are about getting good inbox delivery at Gmail. I’ve mentioned before, I can usually tell when an ISP changes things because they suddenly become the subject of a great many phone calls.
In this case, Gmail seems to have turned up their engagement filters and is sending a lot more mail to the bulk folder. I have also noticed other people are blogging about Gmail delivery problems. Al eventually determined that it was mailings sent from other IPs that were degrading the delivery of his customer’s emails.
Gmail, more than the other major ISPs, seems to not be weighting IP reputation very heavily these days. They’re looking at domain reputation and they’re using all mentions of a domain in that reputation. A lot of senders, some of them spammers, segregate their email streams (acquisition, marketing, transactional) across IP addresses in order to stop poorly performing mails from harming delivery of other emails they’re sending. But Gmail’s current filtering scheme seems designed to focus on domain reputation and minimize the impact of IP reputation.
This is making the Gmail inbox tough to reach for a lot of mailers these days. Even in cases where the mailer isn’t hiring affiliates or actively partitioning mail, if a domain is seen frequently in spam then delivery for that whole domain is hurting. Signing with DKIM and publishing a DMARC record may help. But the reality right now is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet into the Gmail inbox.

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One letter off…

I’m working on a blog post about the new Gmail tabbed inbox and the messages Gmail is inserting into the promotions tab. The messages aren’t showing up on most of my accounts, so I logged into an infrequently used account of mine. Ads are there, I got my screenshots and some data about the behaviour of the messages. So far so good.
I also discovered that at least two other women are using my address. One of them apparently ordered a bunch of wedding stuff from David’s Bridal shop using my email address. I hope Kirstie got her special order in time.
The other case is more interesting. I found dozens of emails in my inbox from what appeared to be friends including me in their email forward chain.
The Comic Sans. The FW:FW:FW:FW:FW subject lines. The horribly drawn cartoons. The inspirational messages. The prayer requests. The invites to bridge night. The followup demands that I reply to their invites for bridge night. The sad emails that I didn’t go to bridge night. There were emails from grandchildren. Questions about where I’d been and if I moved. Prayer chains. The messages go on and on.
Looking back through my inbox, this has been going on since sometime late in 2012. (Told you this was an infrequently used account). I looked and looked and I think I figured out what happened. A woman named Helen appears to to have an email address one letter off from mine (string@ vs stringsstring@) and one of her church friends tried to reply to her and dropped the ‘s’ from the email address. Once she did that, everyone else just kept hitting “reply all” and are including me in their forward chain.
It’s not commercial, it’s not spam. It’s just a bunch of people mistyping an email address and sending mail to someone they don’t know. I’m kinda glad it was a bunch of church ladies rather than Carlos Danger sending … well… Carlos Danger type messages.
People get email addresses wrong sometimes. It happens (ask me about the time I almost got my mailserver blocked because I mistyped an address while sending mail to a blocklist maintainer and hit a trap address by mistake…). The problem is that it can overwhelm an uninvolved person’s mailbox, even when it’s not commercial. Sure, if I was logging in to this account more often I’d probably have shut it down, but if they were paying attention they would have realized Helen is never replying to anything they send.
I kinda feel the same about commercial mailers that send me mail over and over and over again. I never open it, I never reply to it, I never respond to it. I wonder if there is actually anyone actually sending the mail, or if there’s just a lonely mailserver bricked up in a wall somewhere continually sending out spam.
Don’t be the bricked up server in the wall. Pay attention to what your recipients are doing.

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