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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How to send better emails: engagement

Today Direct Marketing News hosted a webinar: ISP Mythbusters: How to Send Better Emails. The speakers were Matt Moleski, the Executive Director of Compliance Operations from Comcast and Autumn Tyr-Salvia, the Director Of Standards And Best Practices from Message Systems.
The webinar went through a series of myths. After Autumn introduced the myth, Matt commented on it and explained why the statement was, or was not, a myth. Throughout the webinar, Matt clearly explained what does, and does not, get mail delivered. Don’t let the Comcast after Matt’s name fool you. He is very active in different fora and discusses filtering strategies with experts across the ISP industry. His insight and knowledge is broadly applicable. In fact, many of the things Matt said today were things I’ve heard other ISPs say over and over again.
One of the very first things he said was that ISPs want to deliver mail their customers want. They want to give customers the best inbox experience possible and that means delivering mails customers want and keeping out mails customers don’t. He also pointed out that recipients complain to the ISPs when they lose wanted mail, perhaps even more than they complain about spam.
He also touched on the topic of engagement. His message was that absolutely engagement does matter for inbox delivery and that engagement is going to matter more and more as filtering continues to evolve. There has been some discussion recently about whether or not engagement is an issue, with some people claiming that some ISP representatives said engagement doesn’t matter. The reality is, that engagement does matter and Matt’s words today only reinforce and clarify that message.
Matt did say is that ISPs and senders have a bit of a disconnect when they are speaking about engagement. ISPs look at engagement on the “macro” level. They’re looking to see if users delete a mail without reading it, file it into a folder, mark it spam or mark it not spam. Senders and marketers look at engagement on a much more finite level and look at interactions with the specific emails and links in the email.
When discussing the relationship between senders and ISPs, he pointed out that both senders and ISPs have the same goal: to personalize the customer experience and to give customers a great experience. As part of this, ISPs are mostly aligned when it comes to blocking principles, but each ISP responds slightly differently. ISPs do adhere to best practices for handling incoming email, but those practices are implemented based on the individual company  and handles incoming mail in ways that better supports their company specifically.
Matt talked about Comcast’s Postmaster pages and says they try to give feedback to senders before putting a block in place. He mentions that invalid recipients and poor list hygiene as the fastest way to be blocked or throttled when sending to Comcast. He also said that the core filtering rules at Comcast are static. Changes are mostly “tweaks around the edges.”
During the Q&A portion, Matt took a number of questions from the audience.

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Email predictions for 2015

Welcome to a whole new year. It seems the changing of the year brings out people predicting what they think will happen in the coming year. It’s something I’ve indulged in a couple times over my years of blogging, but email is a generally stable technology and it’s kind of boring to predict a new interface or a minor tweak to filters. Of course, many bloggers will go way out on a limb and predict the death of email, but I think that’s been way over done.
ChangeConstant
Even major technical advancements, like authentication protocols and the rise of IPv6, are not usually sudden. They’re discussed and refined through the IETF process. While some of these changes may seem “all of a sudden” to some end users, they’re usually the result of years of work from dedicated volunteers. The internet really doesn’t do flag days.
One major change in 2014, that had significant implications for email as a whole, was a free mail provider abruptly publishing a DMARC p=reject policy. This caused a lot of issues for some small business senders and for many individual users. Mailing list maintainers are still dealing with some of the fallout, and there are ongoing discussions about how best to mitigate the problems DMARC causes non-commercial email.
Still, DMARC as a protocol has been in development for a few years. A number of large brands and commercial organizations were publishing p=reject policies. The big mail providers were implementing DMARC checking, and rejection, on their inbound mail. In fact, this rollout is one of the reasons that the publishing of p=reject was a problem. With the flip of a switch, mail that was once deliverable became undeliverable.
Looking back through any of the 2014 predictions, I don’t think anyone predicted that two major mailbox providers would implement p=reject policies, causing widespread delivery failures across the Internet. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it, all of my discussions with people about DMARC centered around business using DMARC to protect their brand. No one mentioned ISPs using it to force their customers away from 3rd party services and discussion lists.
I think the only constant in the world of email is change, and most of the time that change isn’t that massive or sudden, 2014 and the DMARC upheaval notwithstanding.
But, still, I have some thoughts on what might happen in the coming year. Mostly more of the same as we’ve seen over the last few years. But there are a couple areas I think we’ll see some progress made.

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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.

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