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.

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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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Questions on Google lawsuit post

A couple questions in the previous discussion thread about the Google privacy case. Both concern permission granted to Google to scan emails.
Google’s stance about this is fairly simple.
Gmail users give explicit permission for their mail to be scanned.
People who send mail to Gmail users give implicit permission for their mail to be scanned.
The plaintiff’s lawyers are alleging that some subset of gmail users – specifically those at Universities that use Google apps and ISP customers like CableOne – did not give explicit permission for their mail to be scanned by Google. They’re also arguing no senders give permission.
In addition to the lack of permission, the plaintiffs lawyers are arguing that Google’s behaviour is in violation of Google’s own policies.
Google thinks scanning is part of the ordinary course of business and they’re doing nothing wrong.
This is an interesting case. I think anyone who knows about email understands that the people who run the mail server have the ability to read anything that goes through. But a lot of us trust that most postmaster and admin types consider it unprofessional to look at mail without a decent reason. There are good reasons an admin might need to go into a mail spool.
Automated filtering is simply a part of life on the internet these days. Mails have to be scanned for viruses, spam and, yes, they are scanned for targeted advertising. I’m not convinced Google is outside the norm when they say that any emails sent through Google is personal information given too Google and therefore Google can use that information in accordance with their policies.

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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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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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