Google takes on intrusive interstitials

Starting next January, Google will be modifying its mobile search results to lower the ranking of sites that use interstitials that interfere with the users experience. In a blog post announcing the change they explain:

Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.

Search
While this doesn’t have any effect on email delivery, I think it’s noteworthy to mention here for 2 reasons.
First, many interstitials are subscription boxes. If subscription boxes are considered an “intrusive interstitial” then websites may suffer lower visitation due to lower Google ranking. This will result in fewer signups from mobile devices. Removing the interstitial will reduce signup rates, another unwelcome consequence to this change. I don’t have a good solution, although it may be as simple as not showing interstitials to users coming directly from Google. Folks who use interstitials for signups should be looking at this issue now.
Second, it clearly demonstrates the priority Google puts on user experience. Many users get frustrated when they go to a site and there is immediately something blocking the information they’re looking for. Google has heard this and is trying to make their results less frustrating for users. This attitude is also a part of their filtering and blocking decisions. Mail that is deemed annoying or frustrating for users may go to the bulk folder, even when they’re lacking overt spam signs. We’ve certainly seen cases where mail gets filtered with no clear reason other than “people have reported mail like this as spam.”
Overall, I think consumers will appreciate the new search ranking algorithm. I think marketers are going to have to adapt in many ways, not the least of which is figuring out how to collect email addresses without compromising search engine rankings.

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Trawling through the junk folder

As a break from writing unit tests this morning I took a few minutes to go through my Mail.app junk folder, looking for false positives for mail delivered over the past six weeks.
trashcans
We don’t do any connection level rejection here, so any mail sent to me gets delivered somewhere. Anything that looks like malware gets dumped in one folder and never read, anything that scores a ridiculously high spamassassin score gets dumped in another folder and never read, mailing lists get handled specially and everything else gets delivered to Mail.app to deal with. That means that Mail.app sees less of the ridiculously obvious spam and is mostly left to do bayesian filtering, and whatever other magic Apple implemented.
There were about thirty false positives, and they were all B2C bulk advertising mail. I receive a lot of 1:1 mail, transactional mail and B2B marketing mail and there were no false positives at all for any of those.
All the false positives were authenticated with both SPF and DKIM. All of them were for marketing lists I’d signed up for while making a purchase. All of them were “greymail” – mail that I’d agreed to receive, and that was inoffensive but not compelling. While I easily spotted all of them as false positives via the from address and subject, none of them were content I’d particularly missed.
Almost all of the false positives were sent through ESPs I recognized the name of, and about 80% of them were sent through just two ESPs (though that wasn’t immediately obvious, as one of them not only uses random four character domain names, it uses several different ones – stop doing that).
If you’d asked me to name two large, legitimate ESPs from whom I recalled receiving blatant, blatant spam recently, it would be those same two ESPs. Is Mail.app is picking up on my opinions of the mail those ESPs are sending? It’s possible – details specific to a particular ESPs mail composition and delivery pipelines are details that a bayesian learning filter may well recognize as efficient tokens.

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Google drops obsolete crypto

Google is disabling support for email sent using version 3 of SSL or using the RC4 cypher.
They’re both very old – SSLv3 was obsoleted by TLS1.0 in 1999, and RC4 is nearly thirty years old and while it’s aged better than some cyphers there are multiple attacks against it and it’s been replaced with more recent cyphers almost everywhere.
Google has more to say about it on their security blog and if you’re developing software you should definitely pay attention to the requirements there: TLS1.2, SNI, TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256, DNS alternate names with wildcards.
For everyone else, make sure that you’ve applied any patches your vendor has available well before the cutoff date of June 16th.

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Changes at Gmail

As I’ve said before, I can usually tell when some ISP changes their filtering algorithm because I start getting tons and tons of calls about delivery problems at that ISP. This past month it’s been Gmail.
There have been two symptoms I’ve been hearing about. One is an increase in bulk folder delivery for mail that previously was reliably hitting the inbox. The other is a bit more interesting. I’ve heard of 3 different mailers, with good reputations and very clean lists, that are seeing 4xx delays on some of their mail. The only consistency I, and my colleagues at some ESPs, have identified is that the mail is “bursty.”
The senders affected by this do send out mail daily, but the daily mail is primarily order confirmations or receipts or other transactional mails. They send bi-weekly newsletters, though, exploding their volume from a few tens of thousands up to hundreds of thousands. This seems to trigger Gmail to defer mail. It does get delivered eventually. It’s frustrating to try and deal with because neither side is really doing anything wrong, but good senders are seeing delivery delays.
For the bulk foldering, Bronto has a good blog post talking about the changes and offering some solid suggestions for how to deal with them. I’m also hearing from some folks who are reliable that Gmail may be rolling back some of the bulk foldering changes based on feedback from their users.
So if you’re seeing changes at Gmail, it’s not just you.

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