More from Gmail

Campaign Monitor has an interview with Gmail looking at how to get mail to the Gmail inbox. It’s a great article and I think everyone should go read it.
One of the most important things it talks about is how complex filters are.

On Gmail’s end, Sri revealed that there are literally hundreds of signals to decide whether an email should go to the Inbox or the Spam folder. The importance of any given signal is dynamic and determined on complex algorithms, in essence it means that one factor or another isn’t likely to bin an entire campaign and there is no point in obsessing over any one element. “Think of how you can make the user love your mails rather than how to land in the Inbox” was Sri’s basic advice on the subject. Essentially stating if the user likes your mail the spam filter should not stop it from getting to the Inbox.

This really is the crux of delivery. Send email users want to receive. Sri’s statements to Andrew echo many of the things he, and his team, shared with us at M3AAWG in February. I focused more on the technical things but engagement and mail users want to receive was an ongoing theme through the talk.
Gmail is often the toughest inbox to crack because they rely so heavily on engagement metrics. But engagement as a metric for delivery is nothing new. I’ve been writing about how engagement is critical for delivery since at least 2008. I have posts from 2011 talking about how to increase engagement and inbox delivery.
I know that engagement and relevance are bad words in the marketing space. An number of marketers have made very public statements about how relevance is dead and engagement is something bad consultants have made up to keep them in business. The fact of the matter is that engagement is something the ISPs do look at and do measure. Anyone who wants to have a successful email marketing program needs to look at what their users want to receive. Sending mail users want leads to inbox delivery because that’s what makes the ISPs money.

Related Posts

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.

Read More

Gmail FBL update

Last week Gmail started contacting ESPs that signed up for their new FBL with more information on how to set up mailings to receive FBL emails.
One of the struggles some ESPs are having is the requirement for DKIM signing. Many of the bigger ESPs have clients that sign with their own domains. Gmail is telling these ESPs to insert a second DKIM signature to join the FBL.
There are a couple reasons this is not as simple or as doable as Gmail seems to think, and the challenges are technical as well as organizational.
The technical challenges are pretty simple. As of now, not all the bulk MTAs support multiple signatures. I’ve heard that multiple signatures are being tested by these MTA vendors, but they’re not in wide use. This makes it challenging for these ESPs to just turn on multiple signatures. For ESPs that are using open source software, there’s often a lot of customization in their signing infrastructure. Even if they have the capability to dual sign, if they’re not currently using that there is testing needed before turning it on.
None of the technical challenges are show stoppers, but they are certainly show delayers.
The organizational challenges are much more difficult to deal with. These are cases where the ESP customer doesn’t want the ESP to sign. The obvious situation is with large banks. They want everything in their infrastructure and headers pointing at the bank, not at their ESP. They don’t want to have that second signature in their email for multiple reasons. I can’t actually see an ESP effectively convincing the various stakeholders, including the marketing, security and legal staff, that allowing the ESP to inset a second signature is good practice. I’m not even sure it is good practice in those cases, except to get stats from Gmail.
Hopefully, Gmail will take feedback from the ESPs and change their FBL parameters to allow ESPs to get information about their customers who sign with their own domain.

Read More

Is gmail next?

I’m hearing hints that there are some malware or phishing links being sent out to gmail address books, “from” those gmail addresses. If that is what’s happening then it’s much the same thing as has been happening at Yahoo for a while, and AOL more recently, and that triggered their deployment of DMARC p=reject records.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens over the next few days.
I’ve not seen any analysis of how the compromises happened at Yahoo and AOL – do they share a server-side (XSS?) security flaw, or is this a client-side compromise that affects many end users, and is just being targeted at freemail providers one at a time?
Does anyone have any technical details that go any deeper than #AOLHacked and #gmailhacked?

Read More