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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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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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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