Filters working as intended

One of the toughest deliverability problems to deal with is when mail is blocked or going to spam because the filters are working as intended. Often the underlying issue is a lack of permission.

In the consumer space there are some thing the sender can do to change their metrics and get to the inbox. The reality is that a lot of companies who send to consumers can get good delivery even when they don’t have clear permission from the recipients. With the right offer, there is going to be some percentage of people who want, or at least don’t mind, the email. Focusing on these people and dropping the unengaged users can make even purchased lists look good and reach the inbox. Couple that with the hygiene many list sellers do clean their lists and remove any addresses that might react badly to email and even purchased lists can reach the inbox. Focusing on sending to engaged users works to fix poor delivery to consumer ISPs even when the list is purchased.

In the B2B space, though, things are very different. For businesses, email is a tool. Filtering is about keeping the mailbox useable. Much of the business relevant mail doesn’t have images. There aren’t links to click.  The folks maintaining the spam filters don’t have the access to track engagement, nor do they really care if a particular end user wants the mail. In the business space, engagement doesn’t matter. The tactics consumer senders use to deliver aren’t effective in the business space.

There have been multiple cases where employees of filtering companies have indicated their business users have a much lower tolerance for unsolicited emails than consumers do. There was the M3AAWG conference where an filter company employee said their users were asking for a way to block all mail from ESPs. In the last year an employee of a different filter commented on Mailop that their business users wanted their filters to be much more aggressive than their consumer customers did.

One of the use cases potential clients bring me is B2B mail where they are acquiring addresses from conference lists, or LinkedIn or Zoominfo or any of a dozen other avenues. There isn’t anything to do. Business filters are getting a lot more aggressive about blocking these kinds of mail, and they’re getting better at it. What worked a year ago isn’t working now. And most employees and their management don’t like this mail. The mail isn’t wanted.

The filters are working as intended. And they don’t want your mail.

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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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What kind of mail do filters target?

All to often we think of filters as a linear scale. There’s blocking on one end, and there’s an inbox on the other. Every email falls somewhere on that line.
Makes sense, right? Bad mail is blocked, good mail goes to the inbox. The bulk folder exists for mail that’s not bad enough to block, but isn’t good enough to go to the inbox.
Once we get to that model, we can think of filters as just different tolerances for what is bad and good. Using the same model, we can see aggressive filters block more mail and send more mail to bulk, while letting less into the inbox. There are also permissive filters that block very little mail and send most mail to the inbox.
That’s a somewhat useful model, but it doesn’t really capture the full complexity of filters. There isn’t just good mail and bad mail. Mail isn’t simply solicited or unsolicited. Filters take into account any number of factors before deciding what to do with mail.

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