When you can’t get a response

I’ve seen a bunch of folks in different places looking for advice on what to do when they can’t get a response from a postmaster team, or a filtering company. I was all set to write yet another post about how silence is an answer. Digging through the archives, though, I see I’ve written about this twice already in the last 18 months.

Image of a head with gears in it encircled by lightbulbs symbolising brainstorming

Well. OK then. Instead of retreading, I’ll write about the 4 things you can do when you can’t get a response about a delivery problem. (It’s been the kind of day where I want to sprinkle joke advice in through this list, but the responsible, adult side of me says that if I want to make jokes I need to do it elsewhere. Thus, you get real suggestions. I’m sure I’ll forget to change X to whatever number I end up writing. Have I mentioned it’s been a day?)

You can’t figure out why your mail is being blocked and no one will answer your mail. Where do you start?

  1. Figure out what you’ve been sending and TO WHOM. Not just your bulk mail, but also the “cold outreach” mail your sales team has decided to send. Also, pay attention to third parties you’ve hired to send mail on your behalf. Finally, make sure that you don’t have any rogue sales folks inside your organization who decided that they didn’t need to pay attention to permission.
  2. Figure out where your addresses are from. Email marketing has been a thing for 2 decades now. But that doesn’t mean you should be sending mail to all those addresses. Yes, even if they opted in with a cherry on top. People don’t opt-in and expect to hear from you for ever and ever and ever again. What’s the perfect time to let a subscriber grow? You know your audience better than I do, and you are the ones who can best answer the question about when to let folks go. But, you do need to remove dead and unengaged addresses from your list. They just pollute it and contribute to delivery problems longer term.
  3. Clean your list. No, you don’t need to pay some hack company who, tells you they can remove spamtraps for the low, low price of 9999.99 and sending all your addresses to them so they can harvest the data and sell it on to other people. Look at your data, look at your subscriber interactions and think about what addresses it makes sense to say good bye to. You can even have a ceremony. Tip one out at the pub after work. Write a few on a piece of paper and burn it. Whatever. Just make the data better.
  4. Commit to improving the quality of your mail. Embrace the idea that email is a relationship rather than a broadcast channel. (As an aside, I find it hysterically funny how many email marketers clutch their pearls when someone calls it an “email blast” but always have an excuse about why they don’t have the time or resources or management backing to do anything to segment their lists.
  5. Actually improve the quality of your mail. Really. Send the mail people have opted into receive. Let them do the work to tell the ISPs that this is mail they want. It’s a little harder when your mail is hard blocked, but even then GIVE IT A REST. Just stop sending mail to that domain for a while. Most places of any size have some sort of automated block management in place. Let the block expire and then try again. Slowly. Carefully. And with email addresses you are 100% sure actually asked for the mail (hint: these aren’t addresses you collected off a web form or at a checkout counter).

One of the most important pieces of advice I can give, though, is pay attention. Don’t let things get to a block. Many of the mailbox providers have told me directly that mail going to the bulk folder is a negative reputation hit. Even if they made the decision to put it in there, it hurts your reputation to continue sending mail to bulk.

That gradual decrease in inboxing over time is a sign that something is going wrong. It is so, so SO much easier to fix problems when they’re little then trying to deal with delivery problems that has been building up over the last 18 months.

At the same time, though, you don’t need to jump on every slight decrease in opens or inboxing. If it’s one or two days of bad data, just keep an eye on things. Don’t start changing everything, sometimes the mailbox providers just have a bad day. Like Hotmail. Last week. See:

A graph showing a 1 day drop in hotmail delivery across the board.

A bunch of marketers saw the dip, spent a lot of time trying to troubleshoot it, only to discover it was something inside Microsoft that resolved itself the next day.

Today’s advice in a nutshell: you don’t need someone to tell you how to troubleshoot things, the power was inside you the whole time. You just had to learn it for yourself.

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It depends… no more

The two most hated words in deliverability. Many people ask general questions about deliverability and most experts, including myself, answer, “It depends.”
There are a lot of problems with this answer. The biggest problem is that it’s led to the impression that there are no real answers about deliverability. That because we can’t answer hypothetical questions we are really just making the answers up.
Depositphotos_53649203_original
The reason we use “it depends” is because the minute details matter when it comes to deliverability. Wether or not something will hurt or help deliverability depends on the specific implementation. Who’s doing the sending? What is their authentication setup? What IP are they using? How were the addresses collected? What is their frequency? What MTA is used? Are they linking to outside sites? Are they linking to outside services? Where are images hosted? The relevant questions go on and on and on.
I am going to stop saying it depends when answering generic deliverability questions. Instead I will be using the phrase “details matter.” Details do matter. Details are everything. Details drive deliverability.
Details Matter
The importance of details is why many deliverability people hedge their answers. The details do matter.
I will do my best to stop answering It Depends to deliverability questions. Instead, I’ll be answering with question and pointing out the details matter.
 

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Gmail suddenly puts mail in the bulk folder

One of the delivery challenges that regularly comes up in various delivery discussion spaces is the “Gmail suddenly put my mail in spam.” From my perspective, there is rarely a “suddenly” about Gmail’s decision making process.

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ISPs speak at M3AAWG

Last week at M3AAWG representatives from AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook spoke about their anti-spam technologies and what the organizations were looking for in email.
This session was question and answers, with the moderator asking the majority of the questions. These answers are paraphrased from my notes or the MAAWG twitter stream from the session.
What are your biggest frustrations?
AOL: When senders complain they can’t get mail in and we go look at their stats and complaints are high. Users just don’t love that mail. If complaints are high look at what you may have done differently, content does have an effect on complaints.
Outlook: When we tightened down filters 8 years ago we had to do it. Half of the mail in our users inbox was spam and we were losing a steady number of customers. The filter changes disrupted a lot of senders and caused a lot of pain. But these days only 0.5% of mail in the inbox is spam.  Things happen so fast, though, that the stress can frustrate the team.
Gmail: Good senders do email badly sometimes and their mail gets bulked. Senders have to get the basic email hygiene practices right. Love your users and they’ll love you back.
What’s your philosophy and approach towards mail?
AOL: There is a balance that needs to be struck between good and bad mail. The postmaster team reminds the blocking team that not all mail is bad or malicious. They are the sender advocates inside AOL. But the blocking team deals with so much bad mail, they sometimes forget that some mail is good.
Yahoo: User experience. The user always comes first. We strive to protect them from malicious mail and provide them with the emails they want to see. Everything else is secondary.
Gmail: The faster we stop spam the less spam that gets sent overall. We have highly adaptive filters that can react extremely quickly to spam. This frustrates the spammers and they will give up.
Outlook: The core customer is the mailbox user and they are a priority. We think we have most of the hardcore spam under control, and now we’re focused on personalizing the inbox for each user. Everyone online should hold partners accountable and they should expect to be held accountable in turn. This isn’t just a sender / ESP thing, ISPs block each other if there are spam problems.
What are some of your most outrageous requests?
We’ve been threatened with lawsuits because senders just don’t want to do the work to fix things. Some senders try to extort us. Other senders go to the advertising execs and get the execs to yell at the filtering team.
Coming to MAAWG and getting cornered to talk about a particular sender problem. Some senders have even offered money just to get mail to the spam folder.
Senders who escalate through the wrong channels. We spent all this money and time creating channels where you can contact us, and then senders don’t use them.
Confusing business interests with product interests. These are separate things and we can’t change the product to match your business interest.
What are your recommendations for changing behaviors?
Outlook: We provide lots of tools to let you see what your recipients are doing. USE THE TOOLS. Pay attention to your recipient interaction with mail. Re-opt-in recipients periodically. Think about that mail that is never opened. Monitor how people interact with your mail. When you have a problem, use our webpages and our forms. Standard delivery problems have a play book. We’re going to follow that playbook and if you try to get personal attention it’s going to slow things down. If there’s a process problem, we are reachable and can handle them personally. But use the postmaster page for most things.
Gmail: Get your hygiene right. If you get your hygiene right, deliverability just works. If you’re seeing blocking, that’s because users are marking your mail as spam. Pay attention to what the major receivers publish on their postmaster pages. Don’t just follow the letter of the law, follow the spirit as well. Our responsibility, as an ISP, is to detect spam and not spam. Good mailers make that harder on us because they do thinks that look like spammers. This doesn’t get spammer mail in more, it gets legitimate mail in less. Use a real opt-in system, don’t just rely on an implied opt-in because someone made a purchase or something.
Yahoo: ESPs are pretty good about screening their customers, so pay attention to what your ESPs are saying. Send mail people want. Verify that the email addresses given to you actually belong to people who want your mail. Have better sender practices.
What do you think about seed accounts?
The panel wasn’t very happy about the use of seed accounts. Seeds are not that useful any longer, as the ISPs move to more and more personalized delivery. Too much time and too many cycles are used debugging seed accounts. The dynamic delivery works all ways.
When things go wrong what should we do?
AOL: Open a ticket. We know we’ve been lax recently, but have worked out of our backlog and are caught up to date. Using the ticketing system also justifies us getting more headcount and makes everyone’s experience better. Also, don’t continue what you’re doing. Pausing sending while you’re troubleshooting the issue. We won’t adjust a rep for you, but we may be able to help you.
Gmail: Do not jump the gun and open a ticket on the first mail to the spam folder. Our filters are so dynamic, they update every few minutes in some cases. Be sure there is a problem. If you are sure you’re following the spirit and letter of the sender guidelines you can submit a ticket. We don’t respond to tickets, but we work every single one. When you’re opening a ticket provide complete information and full headers, and use the headers from your own email address not headers from a seed account. Give us a clear and concise description of the problem. Also, use the gmail product forum, it is monitored by employees and it’s our preferred way of getting information to the anti-abuse team. Common issues lots of senders are having will get addressed faster.
Outlook: Dig in and do your own troubleshooting, don’t rely on us to tell you what to fix. The support teams don’t have a lot of resources so use our public information. If you make our job harder, then it takes longer to get things done. But tell us what changes you’ve made. If you’ve fixed something, and tell us, our process is different than if you’re just asking for a delisting or asking for information. When you’ve fixed things we will respond faster.
How fast should users expect filters to respond after making changes?
Filters update continually so they should start seeing delivery changes almost immediately. What we find is people tell us they’ve made changes, but they haven’t made enough or made the right ones. If the filters don’t update, then you’ve not fixed the problem.

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