Why is my cold email going to the spam folder?

Because that’s what the spam folder is for unsolicited email.

Sending cold email, particularly in bulk (and let’s be honest, if it weren’t sent in bulk, no one would know or care about it going to spam) is spamming. This is exactly the kind of mail that the bulk folder is designed to catch. Senders that don’t have permission have no path out of the bulk folder except trying to get some permission for their email.

Recently I’ve had an uptick in request for help getting cold emails out of the bulk folder. Some have found me through search engines and this blog. Others have been referred by someone. Whatever the reason, they come to me with a purchased list that isn’t being delivered to the inbox and they want me to help them.

The problem is I can’t help them. They are sending unsolicited email and their mail is being delivered exactly where it should be – in the bulk folder. In the past I’d try to help. I’d pull out my bag of tools and walk them through the steps to fix their delivery. But it often wouldn’t work. They weren’t looking for the kind of help I provide. They were looking for one quick trick to fool the filters into putting the mail in the inbox.

These engagements were frustrating for me, too. I know exactly why their mail isn’t going to the inbox, they’re sending spam. But no company wants to hear they’re spamming. I’d try and explain, using terms like unengaged recipients and unwanted email. I’d offer suggestions on how to create that engagement, how to find their audience, how to be better marketers. That wasn’t what they wanted, they wanted a quick fix that would let them invest pennies into purchased lists that dropped right into the inbox.

It’s not the techniques that are the problem. I regularly use the same techniques with clients who have data containing a mix of opt-in and non-opt-in data. These clients have been collecting data and email addresses through many different channels over many years without an audit trail. We can sort the list out, retain the good data and get rid of the old data.

The problem is that purchased lists are unwanted by recipients and the filters applied to their mail. That doesn’t mean opt-in lists never have delivery issues, they do. And we can fix those delivery issues because, fundamentally, the recipients want that mail. The recipients asked for that mail. There is no such assurance that recipients want mail if the list has been purchased.

Are some purchased lists opt-in? Yeah, probably. But the purchaser has no way of knowing what the address owner originally opted in to receive. All the purchaser has is the assurance of the seller. The seller who makes money even if the list isn’t opt-in.

Why does cold email go to the bulk folder? Because ‘cold email’ is just the most recent euphemism for spam. And the bulk folder is where spam is supposed to be delivered.

A little housekeeping
OATH and Microsoft updates

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Parasites hurt email marketing

As a small business owner I am a ripe target for many companies. They buy my address from some lead generation firm, or they scrape it off LinkedIn, and they send me a message that pretends to be personalized but isn’t really.
“I looked at your website… we have a list of email addresses to sell you.”
“We offer cold calling services… can I set up a call with you?”
“I have scheduled a meeting tomorrow so I can tell you about our product that will solve all your technical issues and is also a floor wax.”
None of these emails are anything more than spam. They’re fake personalized. There’s no permission. On a good day they’ll have an opt out link. On a normal day they might include an actual name.
These are messages coming to an email address I’ve spent years trying to protect from getting onto mailing lists. I don’t do fishbowls, I’m careful about who I give my card to, I never use it to sign up for anything. And, still, that has all been for naught.
I don’t really blame the senders, I mean I do, they’re the ones that bought my address and then invested in business automation software that sends me regular emails trying to get me to give them a phone number. Or a contact for “the right person at your business to talk to about this great offer that will change your business.”
The real blame lies with the people who pretend that B2B spam is somehow not spam. Who have pivoted their businesses from selling consumer lists to business lists because permission doesn’t matter when it comes to businesses. The real blame lies with companies who sell “marketing automation software” that plugs into their Google Apps account and hijacks their reputation to get to the inbox. The real blame lies with list cleansing companies who sell list buyers a cleansing service that only hides the evidence of spamming.
There are so many parasites in the email space. They take time, energy and resources from large and small businesses, offering them services that seem good, but really are worthless.
The biologically interesting thing about parasites, though, is that they do better if they don’t overwhelm the host system. They have to stay small. They have to stay hidden. They have to not cause too much harm, otherwise the host system will fight back.
Email fights back too. Parasites will find it harder and harder to get mail delivered in any volume as the host system adapts to them. Already if I look in my junk folder, my filters are correctly flagging these messages as spam. And my filters see a very small portion of mail. Filtering companies and the business email hosting systems have a much broader view and much better defenses.
These emails annoy me, but I know that they are a short term problem.  As more and more businesses move to hosted services, like Google Apps and Office365 the permission rules are going to apply to business addresses as well as consumer addresses. The parasites selling products and services to small business owners can’t overwhelm email. The defenses will step in first.
 

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It's not fair

In the delivery space, stuff comes in cycles. We’re currently in a cycle where people are unhappy with spam filters. There are two reasons they’re unhappy: false positives and false negatives.
False positives are emails that the user doesn’t think is spam but goes into the bulk folder anyway.
Fales negatives are emails that the user does thing is spam but is delivered to the inbox.
I’ve sat on multiple calls over the course of my career, with clients and potential clients, where the question I cannot answer comes up. “Why do I still get spam?”
I have a lot of thoughts about this question and what it means for a discussion, how it should be answered and what the next steps are. But it’s important to understand that I, and most of my deliverability colleagues, hate this question. Yet we get it all the time. ISPs get it, too.
A big part of the answer is because spammers spend inordinate amounts of time and money trying to figure out how to break filters. In fact, back in 2006 the FTC fined a company almost a million dollars for using deceptive techniques to try and get into filters. One of the things this company did would be to have folks manually create emails to test filters. Once they found a piece of text that would get into the inbox, they’d spam until the filters caught up. Then, they’d start testing content again to see what would get past the filters. Repeat.
This wasn’t some fly by night company. They had beautiful offices in San Francisco with conference rooms overlooking Treasure Island. They were profitable. They were spammers. Of course, not long after the FTC fined them, they filed bankruptcy and disappeared.
Other spammers create and cultivate vast networks of IP addresses and domains to be used in snowshoeing operations. Still other spammers create criminal acts to hijack reputation of legitimate senders to make it to the inbox.
Why do you still get spam? That’s a bit like asking why people speed or run red lights. You still get spam because spammers invest a lot of money and time into sending you spam. They’re OK with only a small percentage of emails getting through filters, they’ll just make it up in volume.
Spam still exists because spammers still exist.
 

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Did the algorithm change?

When faced with unexplained deliverability changes one of the first questions many folks ask is “Did the algorithm change.” In many ways this is an meaningless question. Why? Because there are two obvious answers to the question.
A1: Of course it didn’t.
A2: Of course it did.
Both answers are correct, but they’re answering different underlying questions. When we understand how two diametrically opposed answers are both correct, we understand much more about filtering.

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