Mythbusting deliverability and engagement

Yesterday I published an article talking about an engagement webinar hosted by the EEC and DMA. I made a couple predictions about what would be said.

  1. ISPs do monitor engagement, even if they do it differently than senders thought.
  2. Engagement is important for inbox delivery at some ISPs.
  3. Different ISPs have different ways of making inbox decisions.
  4. Engagement will matter more in the future.

And, yes, all those things were said. The ISPs told us quite a bit about what they look for when making delivery decisions.
ISPs monitor engagement, measured by what users do with the mail. Do they delete it without opening it? Do they move it from the bulk folder to the inbox? Do they whitelist the sender?
ISPs also measure inactive accounts. Some use the mail to inactive accounts as a metric in their delivery decisions. Some don’t. AOL deletes accounts that haven’t logged in for 180 days. (Personal note: logging into AIM counts as a login and they don’t delete your account if you use AIM.)
Some ISPs use engagement as part of their overall reputation metrics. Other ISPs don’t. Outlook, for instance, doesn’t use engagement other than to make decisions about an individual email and the recipient. At Gmail, however, the individual user actions bubble up and affect the overall delivery of a mail.
This is really one of the first times it’s been so clear to me how different the specifics of filtering are at the different ISPs. I mean, I always knew that they all had their special secret sauce. Recent client experiences have also taught me that what works to get mail back into the inbox at one ISP doesn’t always work for another ISP. Hotmail/Outlook (sorry, I am old school enough I haven’t mentally branded them “outlook.com” yet) treats bounces (user unknowns) as a major factor. Other ISPs use spam trap accounts as a major factor in their decisions.
And, while it was never explicitly said, engagement is not going away as a factor in delivery decisions. Filters and algorithms may change, but senders are going to have to focus more and more on sending the emails people really want to receive in order to get to the inbox.
 

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Engagement, it's not what you might think

Most delivery experts will tell you that ISPs measure recipient engagement as a part of their delivery. That’s absolutely true, but I think there’s a language difference that makes it hard for senders to understand what we mean by engagement.
ISPs, and other filtering companies, profile their user base. They know, for instance, who logs in and checks mail every day. They know who checks mail every 20 seconds. They know who gets a lot of spam. They know who hasn’t logged in for months. They know who accurately marks mail as spam and who is sloppy with the this-is-spam button. They know if certain recipients get the same mail, it’s likely to be spam.
Engagement at the ISPs is more about the recipient engaging with their email address and the mail in their mailbox then it is about the recipient engaging with specific emails.
 

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Email marketing OF THE FUTURE!

ISPs are continually developing tools for their users. Some of the newer tools are automatic filters that help users organize the volumes of mail they’re getting. Gmail released Priority Inbox over a year ago. Hotmail announced new filters as part of Wave 5 back in October.
All of these announcements cause much consternation in the email marketing industry. Just today there was a long discussion on the Only Influencers list about the new Hotmail filtering. There was even some discussion about why the ISPs were doing this.
I think it’s pretty simple why they’re creating new tools: users are asking for them. The core of these new filters is ISPs reacting to consumer demand. They wouldn’t put the energy into development if their users didn’t want it. And many users do and will use priority inbox or the new Hotmail filtering.
Some people are concerned that marketing email will be less effective if mail is not in the inbox.

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DMARC and organizations

Comcast recently published a statement on DMARC over on their postmaster page. The short version is that Comcast is publishing a DMARC record, but has no current intentions to publish a p=reject policy for Comcast user email. Comcast will be publishing a p=reject for some of their domains that they use exclusively to communicate with customers, like billing notices and security notices.
Comcast does point out that Yahoo! and AOL’s usage of p=reject is “not common usage.”
This is something a lot of people have been arguing loudly about on various mail operations lists and network lists. DMARC is about organizational identity. In fact, I was contacted about my DMARC primer and told that I didn’t mention that it’s not about domains, it’s about organizations.
The way I read the DMARC spec, it is all about organizational identity. The underlying theme being that the domain name is linked to a particular organization and everyone using email at that domain has some official relationship with that organization. I’ve always read the spec mentally replacing organization with corporate brand. This was for brands and organizations that strictly control how their domains are used, who can use those domains and how the mail is sent with those domains.
I never expected any mailbox provider or commercial ISP to publish a p=reject message as it would just break way too much of the way customers use email. And it did break a lot of legitimate and end user uses of email. Many organizations have had to scramble to update mailing list software to avoid bouncing users off the lists. Some of these upgrades have broken mailbox filters, forcing endusers to change how they manage their mailboxes.
Even organizations see challenges with a p=reject message and can have legitimate mail blocked. At M3AAWG 30 in San Francisco I was talking with some folks who have been actively deploying DMARC for organizations. From my point of view anyone who wants to publish a DMARC p=reject should spend at least 6 months monitoring DMARC failures to identify legitimate sources of email. The person I was talking to said he recommends a minimum of 12 months.
This is just an example of how difficult it is to capture all the legitimate sources of emails from a domain and effectively authenticate that mail. For a mailbox provider, I think it’s nearly impossible to capture all the legitimate uses of email and authenticate them.
It remains to be seen if the other mailbox providers imitate Yahoo! and AOL or if they push back against the use of DMARC reject policies at mailbox providers. Whatever the outcome, this is a significant shift in how email is used. And we’re all going to have to deal with the fallout of that.

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