2017 Deliverability Benchmark report

Return Path has released their 2017 Deliverability Benchmark Report. I haven’t had a chance to look at it, but did download it earlier today.
EContent has a summary of the article up, with the headline Research Finds Email Senders with Strong Subscriber Engagement Are Likely to See Less Email Delivered to SpamUseful data points they pulled out include:

  • The increase in spam placement is somewhat offset by the fact that consumers were more likely than ever to “rescue” wanted mail from the spam folder, as demonstrated by the significant year over year increase in the “this is not spam” rate (1.77% in 2017 versus 1.04% in 2016).
  • Subscribers read email at a slightly lower rate than last year (21.5% in 2017, 22.2% in 2016), but mail that is ignored (or “deleted before reading”) was also slightly less common than a year ago (11.9% in 2017, 12.5% in 2016).

 

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Filters evolving

I started writing this blog post while sitting on a conference call with a bunch of senders discussing some industry wide problems folks are having with delivery. Of course the issue of Microsoft comes up. A lot of senders are struggling with reaching the inbox there and no one has any real, clear guidance on how to resolve it. And the MS employees who regularly answer questions and help folks have been quiet during this time.

In some ways the current situation with Microsoft reminds me of what most deliverability was like a decade ago. Receivers were consistently making changes and they weren’t interacting with senders. There weren’t FBLs really. There weren’t postmaster pages. The reason knowing someone at an ISP was so important was because there was no other way to get information about blocking.
These days, we have a lot more institutional knowledge in the industry. The ISPs realized it was better to invest in infrastructure so senders could resolve issues without having to know the right person. Thus we ended up with postmaster pages and a proliferation of FBLs and best practices and collaboration between senders and receivers and the whole industry benefited.
It is challenging to attempt to troubleshoot deliverability without the benefit of having a contact inside ISPs. But it is absolutely possible. Many ISP folks have moved on over the years; in many cases due to layoffs or having their positions eliminated. The result is ISPs where there often isn’t anyone to talk to about filters.
The lack of contacts doesn’t mean there’s no one there and working. For instance, in the conference call one person asked if we thought Microsoft was going to fix their systems or if this is the new normal. I think both things are actually true. I think Microsoft is discovering all sorts of interesting things about their mail system code now that it’s under full load. I think they’re addressing issues as they come up and as fast as they can. I also think this is some level of a new normal. These are modern filters that implement the lessons learned over the past 20 years of spam filtering without the corresponding cruft.
Overall, I do think we’re in a period of accelerating filter evolution. Address filtering problems has always been a moving target, but we’ve usually been building on known information. Now, we’re kinda starting over. I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t know exactly what the future will bring. But I think the world of deliverability is going to get challenging again.
 

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Edison acquires part of Return Path

Today Matt Blumberg announced that Edison Software acquired Return Path’s Consumer Insight division, current customers and some Return Path staff.
Congrats to everyone involved.

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Images at Yahoo

For a while, Yahoo was giving preferential “images always on” treatment to Return Path Certified senders. The tricky part of this was the senders had to register a DKIM selector key with Yahoo. I had a lot of (somewhat rude) things to say about this particular design decision.
Over the last few months, a number of senders have complained about being unable to update their selector keys with Yahoo. (Insert more rude comments about how broken it is to use the selector as a part of reputation.) Around the same time, a few of us have noticed that Yahoo seems to be turning on a lot of images by default. A few of the ESP delivery folks collaborated with me on checking into this. They could confirm that images were on by default for some of their customers without certification and without selector key registration.
Earlier this week, Return Path sent out an email to users that said that Yahoo would no longer be turning images on by default for Return Path Certified IPs.

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