Improving Gmail Delivery

Lately I’m hearing a lot of people talk about delivery problems at Gmail. I’ve written quite a bit about Gmail (Another way Gmail is different, Gmail filtering in a nutshell, Poor delivery at Gmail but no where else, Insight into Gmail filtering) over the last year and a half or so. But those articles all focus on different parts of Gmail delivery and it’s probably time for a summary type post.

Gmail is different

There are two major reasons that Gmail filtering is different from the other webmail providers: when it was launched and who it was launched by.
Gmail entered the mail market late in the internet era when compared to other free email providers. AOL offered internet email in 1992; Yahoo Mail opened in 1994; Hotmail debuted in 1996. When these systems were in development, spam wasn’t an issue.
Spam filtering was added later, as the problem grew. Gmail didn’t launch until 2004, nearly a decade after their current competitors. Spam was already a problem by 2004, so Gmail was able to build filters in from the beginning.
The other real difference is Google’s experience and expertise in search. They built their business on being able to take lots and lots of data, categorize it and make it instantly searchable. This actually translates well to spam filtering, in that they take lots of data, categorize it and put it in appropriate mailboxes.
Those aren’t the only reasons Gmail is different. Another factor is Gmail’s attitude towards senders. The prime example is their FBL. Unlike most ISPs, Gmail doesn’t provide the full message back in its FBL. Instead, they give a count of complaints. They’re not going to help senders remove folks who complain. The flip side of this is they are leading the way in providing easier ways to unsubscribe.
The different history, expertise, and attitude of Google are the core of why Gmail delivery is so unlike others.

Metrics look great

The standard diagnostic for problem is to investigate the metrics, identify areas where they show limits and work to improve them. Along the way, email delivery improves. At Gmail, however, there’s often nothing obviously wrong with the metrics. The problem is the metrics we’re using are measuring symptoms not identifying underlying issues. Think of all the metrics we use as a fever. Just because a fever is gone (or you don’t have one) doesn’t mean you’re not sick.
Metrics are proxy measurements. The best metrics in the world aren’t going to help your delivery at Gmail if the recipients don’t want your mail.
The Recipient Has To Want Your Mail.

Why is Gmail so hard?

Because Gmail is smarter than we are.
Because Gmail looked at the things other companies did and learned what worked to decrease spam and what worked to decrease signs of spam (those are different things).
Because Gmail has years and years of experience in dealing with people who game SEO listings.
Because Gmail puts the user experience ahead of the sender experience.

Related Posts

Filtering by gestalt

One of those $5.00 words I learned in the lab was gestalt. We were studying fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and, at the time, there were no consistent measurements or numbers that would drive a diagnosis of FAS. Diagnosis was by gestalt – that is by the patient looking like someone who had FAS.
It’s a funny word to say, it’s a funny word to hear. But it’s a useful term to describe the future of spam filtering. And I think we need to get used to thinking about filtering acting on more than just the individual parts of an email.

Filtering is not just IP reputation or domain reputation. It’s about the whole message. It’s mail from this IP with this authentication containing these URLs.  Earlier this year, I wrote an article about Gmail filtering. The quote demonstrates the sum of the parts, but I didn’t really call it out at the time.

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The cycle goes on

Monday I published a blog post about the ongoing B2B spam and how annoying it is. I get so many of these they’re becoming an actual problem. 3, 4, 5 a day. And then there’s the ongoing “drip” messages at 4, 6, 8, 12 days. It is getting out of control. It’s spam. It’s annoying. And most of it’s breaking the law.
But, I can also use it as blog (and twitter!) fodder.

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Active buttons in the subject line

This morning I waded into a twitter discussion with a bunch of folks about some issues they were having with delivery to gmail. The discussion started with a blog post at detailed.com describing how some senders are seeing significant drops in open rates. I thought I’d take a look and see if I can help, because, hey, this is an interesting problem.
I signed up for a bunch of the mail that was seeing gmail problems and discovered that one of them had the confirmation link in the subject line. How cool is that?

I’ve known about the Gmail subscription line functionality for a while, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in the wild.
The action is in a <div> tag at the bottom of the email. Gmail has been allowing actions in subject lines for a while, this is just the first time I’ve seen it used for subscriptions. It’s so cool.
Want to add one to your post? Instructions are available from Google on their Email Markup pages.

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