Horses, not zebras

I was first introduced to the maxim “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras” when I worked in my first molecular biology lab 20-some-odd years ago. I’m no longer a gene jockey, but I still find myself applying this to troubleshooting delivery problems for clients.
It’s not that I think all delivery problems are caused by “horses”, or that “zebras” never cause problems for email delivery. It’s more that there are some very common causes of delivery problems and it’s a more effective use of time to address those common problems before getting into the less common cases.
This was actually something that one of the mailbox provider reps said at M3AAWG in SF last month. They have no problem with personal escalations when there’s something unusual going on. But, the majority of issues can be handled through the standard channels.
What are the horses I look for with delivery problems.

  1. Technical issues. These are actually getting rarer as companies move to the designed-for-bulk MTAs like MessageSystems and Port25. But they’re still worth checking and can contribute to delivery problems. Luckily, technical issues are often the easiest to solve, and once they’re solved usually stay solved.
  2. Content issues. These are getting much more common as ISPs start looking at all the URLs and links in emails, including the landing pages.  Gmail, for instance, does almost all their filtering based on content rather than originating IP. This is not that difficult to solve, but can be harder to solve than technical issues.
  3. Address collection issues. Most delivery problems start at the point of address collection, and these can be challenging problems to solve. Not only do you have to solve the problem moving forward, you also have to decide what to do with the addresses you’ve previously collected. And the problems are only solved as long as someone knows why things are done the way they are.

 

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Over the years I’ve heard just about every excuse as to why a particular client can’t set expectations well. One of the most common is that no one does it. My experience this weekend at a PetSmart indicates otherwise.
As I was checking out I showed my loyalty card to the cashier. He ran it through the machine and then started talking about the program.
Cashier: Did you give us your email address when you signed up for the program?
Me: I’m not sure, probably not. I get a lot of email already.
Cashier: Well, if you do give us an email address associated with the card every purchase will trigger coupons sent to your email address. These aren’t random, they’re based on your purchase. So if you purchase cat stuff we won’t send you coupons for horse supplies.
I have to admit, I was impressed. PetSmart has email address processes that I recommend to clients on a regular basis. No, they’re not a client so I can’t directly take credit. But whoever runs their email program knows recipients are an important part of email delivery. They’re investing time and training into making sure their floor staff communicate what the email address will be used for, what the emails will offer and how often they’ll arrive.
It’s certainly possible PetSmart has the occasional email delivery problem despite this, but I expect they’re as close to 100% inbox delivery as anyone else out there.

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There are two real standards that define what is a valid email address and what isn’t. The most complex is RFC 5322 – Internet Message Format, which describes all sorts of things about the structure of an email, including what’s valid to put in From: and To: headers. It’s really too liberal in what it allows an email address to look like to be terribly useful, but it does provide for one very commonly used feature – the friendly from where the name that’s displayed to the recipient is not just the email address.

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