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.

Open subscription forms going away?
Ask Laura: Is it spam?

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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.

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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Glitchy Google Postmaster tools

A bunch of folks today mentioned they were seeing poor reputation for formerly good reputations on Google Postmaster Tools. I’m seeing a lot of screen shots that look like this one.
Postmaster_Tools
It looks like something is going on over there that has nothing to do with actual reputation. Could be a reporting bug, could be a filtering problem. I’m not seeing people mention delivery problems, just that the reputation monitor is showing bad reputation.

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Confusing the engineers

We went camping last weekend with a bunch of friends. Had a great time relaxing on the banks of the Tuolumne River, eating way too much and visiting.
On Saturday I was wearing a somewhat geeky t-shirt. It said 554: abort mission. (Thank you MessageSystems). At some point on Saturday every engineer came up to me, read my shirt and then looked at me and said “That’s not HTTP.”
That lead to various discussions about how their junior engineers don’t actually know SMTP at all. Why? Because the SMTP libraries just work. Apparently the HTTP libraries aren’t that great, so folks have to learn more about HTTP to troubleshoot and use them.
I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere: A Kindle engineer, an Android engineer and a robot engineer walk into a campsite…
EmailFilters_boxes_forblogIt did leave me thinking, though, about how it’s not that easy to run your own mail server these days. Gone are the days when running your own server was cost effective and easy. These days, there is just too much spam coming in. Crafting filters is a skilled job. It’s not that hard to run good filters. But to run good filters takes time to do well.
There are also a lot of challenges to sending mail. One of the discussions I had at the campsite was how hard it was to configure outbound mail. The engineer was helping a friend set up a website and trying to get the website to send notifications to the friend. But without setting up authentication the mail kept silently failing.
Of course, we do run our own mail server. But it’s our job and, in many ways, it keeps us honest. We don’t run many filters meaning we see what spammers are doing and can use our own experiences to better understand what commercial filters are dealing with.
For most people, though, I really think using a service is the right solution. Find one with filters that meet your needs and just pay them to deal with the headache.
 

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