Mail Client Improvements

There’s been extensive and ongoing development of email through the years, but much of it has been behind the scenes. We were focused on the technology and safety and robustness of the channel. We’re not done yet, but things are much better than they were.
The good part of that is there is some space to make improvements to the inbox as well. Over the last few months there have been a number of announcements from different mail client providers about how they’re updating their mail client.

Unsubscribes handled by the email client

Apple announced they were adding a link to unsubscribe into the mail client for iOS 10. It works much like the links in the Gmail and Hotmail clients, by looking for the list unsubscribe header and then sending a message to that address. Al did a bunch of testing and has a full blog post on how the list unsub link works in iOS, so go check out his post.
The important bits are they’re only using the mailto: link, they are not following any URLs. For those of you who want to support this, you’ll need to provide an address for unsubscribes. One of the absolute easiest ways to do this is use an encoded left hand side of the address so each unsubscribe can be processed based on the email address. Think of it like a VERP string.
It’s worth noting that two large players, Apple and Google, in the email client space have focused on the mailto: link for unsubscribes. There are issues that come up with an email client mediated unsubscribes, but a number of them go away using a http:// level unsubscribe.
It’s also interesting that this innovation has created a discussion among some marketers about where the unsubscribe link should be in an email. Some people feel very strongly that the only right place to put an unsubscribe link is at the bottom of an email. That choice is being somewhat removed from their hands with these changes to the mail client.

Better CSS and HTML support

Last month Microsoft went to the Litmus design conference and announced they were going to be working with Litmus and email senders to improve mail display in Outlook. This week Gmail announced they were supporting more CSS to make responsive design easier.

Displaying security information to end users

Earlier this year, Gmail started showing their users if mail came in over an encrypted connection. Mail sent without using TLS received an open red padlock next to the sender’s name.
This week folks noticed Gmail had quietly rolled out another feature to communicate security status to end users. Now, if you click on “show original” Gmail doesn’t simply show you a raw text version of the file, they show you specific authentication information about that message.
I have a screen shot of what that information looks like.
GoogleShowOriginal
There are multiple features here that make it easier to see what’s going on with email.

  1. How long the delivery took! This is great, because there are so many places email can get caught up. This will tell senders wether the problem is on the sending side or the receiving side. Looking at the headers of this particular message, the time is looking at how long the message took to get from the Gmail MX to the user’s inbox (or, in this case, spam folder).
  2. SPF pass. The learn more link is a little disappointing, as it  mostly talks about how you can implement SPF, not about what it means for recipients. It also says it helps recipients distinguish spam, except this particular message is a classic 419 spam. But it’s a good start.
  3. DMARC pass. Again, there isn’t much information about why a user should care about DMARC passing in the learn more link, but it is a good start.

Overall, these are exciting developments for recipients and senders. It’s really nice to see some work being done at making mail clients more descriptive. Because so much online security revolves around email, it’s a critical security step to show authentication results to end users. I expect some of these changes will be pushed out to the inbox over time, as Gmail wrestles with providing enough but not too much information.
All in all, these are more meaningful changes to email clients than I’ve seen in years.

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August 2014: The Month in Email

Isn’t August the month where things are supposed to slow down? We’re still waiting for that to happen around here… it’s been great to be busy, but we’re hoping to continue to carve out more time for blogging as we move into the fall.
August
As usual, we reported on a mix of industry trends and news, the persistence of spam, and did a deep dive into an interesting technical topic. Let’s start there: Steve wrote a post explaining Asynchronous Bounces (yes, it’s a GNFAB), with some examples of how they’re used and how they can cause operational problems.
In industry news, we did a roundup post of some Gmail changes and a followup post on security issues with non-Latin characters in addresses. We also celebrated the long-awaited release of a wonderful resource from MAAWG that I am very proud to have helped author, the white paper Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link). We receive dozens of these calls every week, and though we are always happy to help people solve urgent delivery crises, we spend most of our consulting time and attention working with people to build sustainable email programs, so this document is a great “self-service” resource for people looking to troubleshoot blocklist issues on their own.
In other industry and MAAWG-related news, we noted that the nomination period for the J.D. Falk award has opened (you have just a few more days, procrastinators) and took a moment to reminisce about our friend J.D. and his incredible contributions to the field.
On the topic of creating, sending, and reading more attractive email, we posted some  resources from Mailchimp and crowdsourcing templates from Send With Us. We also incorrectly reported on a not-actually-new interface from AOL, Alto. Interesting to note that there’s been so little followup from AOL (and almost no post-launch coverage) in the two years since launch.
We also touched on a few myths: email saves trees and low complaint volume is good.
And finally, in November of 2013, I unsubscribed from every possible email I received on a specific account. I followed up on that briefly in a Part 2 post, and this month went back and wrote a Part 3 followup. Spoiler alert: spam is still a problem. Of course, we got some comments that we were probably doing it wrong, so Unsubscribe Barbie showed up to add her thoughts. We try not to be snarky around here, but sometimes we just don’t try very hard.

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Gmail showing authentication results to endusers

A bit of older news, but worth a blog post. Early in August, Gmail announced changes to the inbox on both the web interface and the android client. They will be pushing authentication results into the interface, so end users can see which emails are authenticated.

These are not deliverability changes, the presence or absence of authentication will not affect inbox delivery. And the gmail Gmail support pages clarify that lack of authentication is not a sign that mail is spam.
This isn’t a huge change for most ESPs and most senders. In fact, Gmail has reported more than 95% of their mail is authenticated with either SPF or DKIM. Now, Gmail does a “best guess” SPF – if it looks like an IP should be authorized to send mail for a domain (like the sending IP is the same as the MX) then it’s considered authenticated.
It’s good to see authentication information being passed to the end user.

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