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.

B2B mail and compliance failures
Recycled spamtraps

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Want some history?

I was doing some research today for an article I’m working on. The research led me to a San Francisco Law Review article from 2001 written by David E. Sorkin. Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Electronic Mail (.pdf link). The text itself is a little outdated, although not as much as I expected. There’s quite a good discussion of various ways to control spam, most of which are still true and even relevant.

From a historical perspective, the footnotes are the real meat of the document. Professor Sorkin discusses many different cases that together establish the rights of ISPs to filter mail, some of which I wasn’t aware of. He also includes links to then-current news articles about filtering and spam. He also mentions different websites and articles written by colleagues and friends from ‘back in the day’ discussing spam on a more theoretical level.
CNET articles on spam and filtering was heavily referenced by Professor Sorkin. One describes the first Yahoo spam folder. Some things never change, such as Yahoo representatives refusing to discuss how their system works. There were other articles discussing Hotmail deploying the MAPS RBL (now a part of Trend Micro) and then adding additional filters into the mix a few weeks later.
We were all a little naive back then. We thought the volumes of email and spam were out of control. One article investigated the effectiveness of filters at Yahoo and Hotmail, and quoted a user who said the filters were working well.

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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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