It depends… no more

The two most hated words in deliverability. Many people ask general questions about deliverability and most experts, including myself, answer, “It depends.”
There are a lot of problems with this answer. The biggest problem is that it’s led to the impression that there are no real answers about deliverability. That because we can’t answer hypothetical questions we are really just making the answers up.
Depositphotos_53649203_original
The reason we use “it depends” is because the minute details matter when it comes to deliverability. Wether or not something will hurt or help deliverability depends on the specific implementation. Who’s doing the sending? What is their authentication setup? What IP are they using? How were the addresses collected? What is their frequency? What MTA is used? Are they linking to outside sites? Are they linking to outside services? Where are images hosted? The relevant questions go on and on and on.
I am going to stop saying it depends when answering generic deliverability questions. Instead I will be using the phrase “details matter.” Details do matter. Details are everything. Details drive deliverability.
Details Matter
The importance of details is why many deliverability people hedge their answers. The details do matter.
I will do my best to stop answering It Depends to deliverability questions. Instead, I’ll be answering with question and pointing out the details matter.
 

Related Posts

Content based filtering

Content filtering is often hard to explain to people, and I’m not sure I’ve yet come up with a good way to explain it.
A lot of people think content reputation is about specific words in the message. The traditional content explanation is that words like “Free” or too many exclamation points in the subject line are bad and will be filtered. But it’s not the words that are the issue it’s that the words are often found in spam. These days filters are a lot smarter than to just look at individual words, they look at the overall context of the message.
ISP_tolerances
Even when we’re talking content filters, the content is just a way to identify mail that might cause problems. Those problems are evaluated the same way IP reputation is measured: complaints, engagement, bad addresses. But there’s a lot more to content filtering than just the engagement piece. What else is part of content evaluation?

Read More

Filtering is not just about spam

A lot of filters started out just as filters against spam. But over the years they’ve morphed into more general blocks against dangerous or problematic email. There’s a lot of crime and bad behavior on the internet, much of it using email as a conduit or vector. Filtering is so much more than stopping spam now. It’s as much, or more, about stopping crime.
Email filters are essential to protect us from scammers. Sometimes I forget this, and then I read about a grandmother getting swindled by a Nigerian scammer and ending up dead.
There are real consequences to poor filtering and there is real crime facilitated by email. It’s easy to forget this as we deal with the email that gets caught in filters when they shouldn’t.
Filters are one of the first lines of defense against online crime.
Not only does filtering stop crime, but they also keep email working. An unfiltered mail stream is an ugly, unreadable, unworkable mess.

Read More

Ever changing filtering

One of the ongoing challenges sending email, and managing a high volume outbound mail server is dealing with the ongoing changes in filtering. Filters are not static, nor can they be. As ISPs and filtering companies identify new ways to separate out wanted email from unwanted email, spammers find new ways to make their mail look more like wanted mail.
This is one reason traps are useful to filtering companies. With traps there is no discussion about whether or not the mail was requested. No one with any connection to the email address opted in to receive mail. The mail was never requested. While it is possible for trap addresses to get on any list monitoring mail to spam traps is a way to monitor which senders don’t have good practices.
New filtering techniques are always evolving. I mentioned yesterday that Gmail was making filtering changes, and that this was causing a lot of delivery issues for senders. The other major challenge for Gmail is the personalized delivery they are doing. It’s harder and harder for senders to monitor their inbox delivery because almost every inbox is different at Gmail. I’ve seen different delivery in some of my own mailboxes at Gmail.
All of this makes email delivery an ongoing challenge.

Read More