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 Spam. Useful 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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August 2017: The month in email

Hello! Hope all are keeping safe through Harvey, Irma, Katia and the aftermath. I know many people that have been affected and are currently out of their homes. I am proud to see so many of my fellow deliverability folks are helping our displaced colleagues with resources, places to stay and money to replace damaged property.
Here’s a mid-month late wrapup of our August blog posts. Our favorite part of August? The total eclipse, which was absolutely amazing. Let me show you some pictures.





Ok, back to email.
We’re proud of the enormous milestone we marked this month: ten years of near-daily posts to our Word to the Wise blog. Thanks for all of your attention and feedback over the past decade!
In other industry news, I pointed to some interesting findings from the Litmus report on the State of Email Deliverability, which is always a terrific resource.
I also wrote about the evolution of filters at web-based email providers, and noted that Gmail’s different approach may well be because it entered the market later than other providers.
In spam, spoofing, and other abuse-related news, I posted about how easy it is for someone to spoof a sender’s identity, even without any technical hacks. This recent incident with several members of the US presidential administration should remind us all to be more careful with making sure we pay attention to where messages come from. How else can you tell that someone might not be wholly legitimate and above-board? I talked about some of what I look at when I get a call from a prospective customer as well as some of the delightful conversations I’ve had with spammers over the years.
In the security arena, Steve noted the ongoing shift to TLS and Google’s announcement that they will label text and email form fields on pages without TLS as “NOT SECURE”. What is TLS, you ask? Steve answers all your questions in a comprehensive post about Transport Layer Security and Certificate Authority Authorization records.
Also worth reading, and not just for the picture of Paddington Bear: Steve’s extremely detailed post about local-part semantics, the chunk of information before the at sign in an email address. How do you choose your email addresses (assuming they are not assigned to you at work or school…)? An email address is an identity, both culturally and for security purposes.
In subscription best practices — or the lack thereof — Steve talked about what happens when someone doesn’t quite complete a user registration. Should you send them a reminder to finish their registration? Of course! Should you keep sending those reminders for 16 months after they’ve stopped engaging with you? THE SURPRISING ANSWER! (Ok, you know us. It wasn’t that surprising.)

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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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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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