Sharing access to Google Postmaster Tools

laura
Industry
January 6, 2017

As a delivery consultant, I always ask clients to share their Google postmaster reports with me. As Gmail is one of the bigger delivery challenges for a lot of senders, having access to the postmaster tools helps tease out issues. I had some issues earlier this week getting access to tools and so brought up a conversation on one of the delivery lists. The nice folks there helped me get it solved.
A few hours later someone asked me how do I get access and I thought that was a brilliant idea for a blog post today.

Site owner grants access.

The owner of the postmaster tools account goes to http://postmaster.google.com and hovers over the domain to share. A context menu pops up.

Click on the “Manage Users” link.

Adding a user is as simple as clicking on the big red button and typing in the users email address. This address must be either a gmail.com address or a domain hosted at Google apps.
Once that’s done, tell the user they have permission to access the document.

User adds domain to their dashboard.

Before the data is visible, the user must add the domain to their dashboard. Again, click the big red button in the bottom corner.
A dialog box pops up asking for the domain used to authenticate your email.

Type in the domain name. It should now appear in their dashboard.

Things to remember.

Only gmail.com or google apps hosted email addresses can be used for the Postmaster tools. Those of us using our own domains on different hosting must create a gmail.com address in order to see Postmaster tools.
Postmaster tools only provide data after a threshold volume is reached. We have no data for wordtothewise.com, for instance, because we simply don’t send enough mail.
Happy Investigating!

iOS List Unsubscribe Functionality

Al did a great post over on Spamresource about the how the new list unsubscribe function in the default mail client from iOS10. What’s been interesting to me is how much I’m hearing from ESP folks about how their customers want it gone.
If you don’t know what we’re talking about, in the default mail client on iOS10, Apple is now offering a way to unsubscribe from list mail by placing an unsubscribe link at the top of the message.

As you can see, this isn’t just for commercial mail, it’s in place for every mailing list that has a List-Unsubscribe header. (This is a screenshot from something I posted to OI this morning). For me, it’s somewhat intrusive. I’m on a lot of discussion lists – technical, marketing, business and even a couple social ones. Reading them on my phone has become a challenge, as every email in a thread contains the “unsubscribe” button now.
Luckily, you can dismiss the message for all posts to that mailing list by hitting the ⮾⮾⮾⮾x. Interestingly, once you’ve turned it off there seems to be no way to turn it back on for that list.
Senders have different complaints, however, they do not have to do with intrusiveness or usability issues.
I’ve heard complaints about placement and about how easy it makes it to unsubscribe. One person even stated that everyone knows the place for an unsubscribe is at the bottom of a message and it should never be at the top of a message. I find these arguments unpersuasive. Unsubscribing should be easy. Unsubscribing should be trivial. People should be able to stop getting mail on a whim. Particularly here in the US, where unsolicited mail is legal, being able to quickly opt-out is the only thing keeping some of our mailboxes useful.
I’ve also heard some concerns that are a little more understandable. One company was concerned that unsubscribes go directly to their ESP rather than directly to them. This is a somewhat more understandable concern. Good senders use unsubscribes as part of their KPIs and as part of their campaign metrics. They know how much an unsubscribe costs them and will use that as part of their metrics for defining a successful campaign. Still, though, it’s not that big a concern. ESPs are already handling these kinds of unsubscribes from providers like gmail and hotmail.
Almost 7 years ago I blogged about a sender who wanted an unsubscribe link in the email client. It was a bit of snark on my part. The interesting part, though, is that some senders want unsubscribe mediated in the client and others things it’s horrible. I think this tells me that there’s no universal right answer. It Depends might be the most hated statement in deliverability, but it is the absolutely the reality of the situation.

Poor delivery at Gmail but no where else

I’ve mentioned before that I can often tell what ISP is making filter changes by what my calls are about. The last few weeks it’s been Gmail where folks are struggling to get to the inbox. One of the things most clients and potential clients have mentioned is that they’re not having any problems at the other major ISPs.

December 2016: The Month in Email

Happy New Year! We’re looking forward to some interesting new projects this year, both for our clients and for Word to the Wise. Stay tuned!
December was a slow month for blogging, with everything going on. But we’re back on the horse now and ready to blog for 2017.

List and subscription management continue to be hot topics, especially in the wake of the listbombing attacks earlier this year. Earlier this month, I presented a webinar on listbombing for the EEC and DMA to review the attacks and discuss best practices for companies to manage subscriptions. For Ask Laura, I wrote about the unsubscribe process and how senders can best manage those requests to keep their lists current and compliant.
With all the holiday mail flying around, Steve wrote up a good post about the challenges of DNS hosting and issues customers may have reaching your site. He also wrote about canonicalization, a process for comparing things to see if they are the same, which is useful for understanding how messages change during the delivery process. It’s important to understand how this works with DKIM, as that process specifically looks at changes to messages in delivery to validate them.
I wrote a post about how delivery at Gmail is a bit different from other mail providers, which can lead to intermittent delivery problems, and got some useful information in the comments about some upcoming process changes. And as always, unwanted email is SPAM. It doesn’t matter if you call it outreach or prospecting, or “here’s something you might find interesting!” Still SPAM.