Thoughts on SenderScore

Kevin Senne posted over on the Oracle blog about how we need to stop caring about SenderScore and why it’s not as useful a metric as it used to be.
I can’t argue with anything he’s said. I think there is way too much focus on IP reputation and SenderScore. There’s so much more to deliverability than just one or two factors.
In fact, if you’ve been to any of my recent webinars or talks you will probably have seen some version of this image in my slides:
SenderScore99_cropped
Basically, just because you have a great SenderScore doesn’t mean you’re going to have good delivery.  Likewise, having a poor SenderScore doesn’t mean your mail is destined to be undelivered.
I tell clients, and people who ask about SenderScore that it reflects the data that Return Path gets, run through their proprietary algorithms to come up with a score. And that score is relevant for those ISPs that pay attention to it. But most ISPs make the deliver or not deliver decision based on their own internal data, not on the IPs SenderScore.

What’s more important for deliverability is the email reputation. Email reputation combines content reputation, link reputation, IP reputation and sender reputation into one score. Emails with poor reputation are often blocked during the SMTP transaction. After mail is accepted it goes through the personalized filters and then it’s delivered to the inbox or the bulk folder.
NewDeliverabilityModel
Filters are complex. I’m not ready to give up any available data, including the SenderScore, when troubleshooting delivery problems for my clients. But I also don’t work to fix a client’s SenderScore. I work to fix a client’s deliverability. Sometimes that improvement is shown in SenderScore improvements. Sometimes it’s not.

When did the reject happen?
Dealing with blocklists, deliverability and abuse people

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Links for 1/7

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Gene M. at Forbes asks Is Constant Contact the Best E-Mail Marketing Service?. I’m not sure Constant Contact is the best, but it’s nice to see that some people do realize that the occasional compliance incident just means that the ISP is actually monitoring things.
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Good news for Sender Score Certified IPs. Return Path recently announced that AOL has joined the list of ISPs offering preferential treatment to certified IPs.
 

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Images at Yahoo

For a while, Yahoo was giving preferential “images always on” treatment to Return Path Certified senders. The tricky part of this was the senders had to register a DKIM selector key with Yahoo. I had a lot of (somewhat rude) things to say about this particular design decision.
Over the last few months, a number of senders have complained about being unable to update their selector keys with Yahoo. (Insert more rude comments about how broken it is to use the selector as a part of reputation.) Around the same time, a few of us have noticed that Yahoo seems to be turning on a lot of images by default. A few of the ESP delivery folks collaborated with me on checking into this. They could confirm that images were on by default for some of their customers without certification and without selector key registration.
Earlier this week, Return Path sent out an email to users that said that Yahoo would no longer be turning images on by default for Return Path Certified IPs.

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