Recent Posts

Ever changing filtering

One of the ongoing challenges sending email, and managing a high volume outbound mail server is dealing with the ongoing changes in filtering. Filters are not static, nor can they be. As ISPs and filtering companies identify new ways to separate out wanted email from unwanted email, spammers find new ways to make their mail look more like wanted mail.
This is one reason traps are useful to filtering companies. With traps there is no discussion about whether or not the mail was requested. No one with any connection to the email address opted in to receive mail. The mail was never requested. While it is possible for trap addresses to get on any list monitoring mail to spam traps is a way to monitor which senders don’t have good practices.
New filtering techniques are always evolving. I mentioned yesterday that Gmail was making filtering changes, and that this was causing a lot of delivery issues for senders. The other major challenge for Gmail is the personalized delivery they are doing. It’s harder and harder for senders to monitor their inbox delivery because almost every inbox is different at Gmail. I’ve seen different delivery in some of my own mailboxes at Gmail.
All of this makes email delivery an ongoing challenge.

Outlook 365 having a bad day

I’ve seen scattered reports today that some mail to the Outlook 365 servers is failing. This has been confirmed by ZDNet. Only folks with a Office 365 account can log in and see the status messages, but there are some folks on the mailop list posting updates from the website.
Attempts to mail to affected domains results in this response:

Delivering to Gmail

Gmail is a challenge for even the best senders these days.
With the recent Gmail changes there isn’t any clear fix to getting open rates or inbox delivery back up. Some of it depends on what is causing Gmail to filter the mail. Changing subject lines, from name, from address may get mail back to the inbox in the short term, but it only works until the filters catch up.
What I am seeing, across a number of clients, is that Gmail is doing a lot of content reputation and that content reputation gets spread across senders of that content. That means you want to look at who is sending any mail on your behalf (mentioning your domain or pointing at your website) and their practices. If they have poor practices, then it can reflect badly on you and result in filtering.
From what I’ve seen, these are very deliberate filtering decisions by Google. And it’s making mail a lot harder for many, many senders. But I think it is, unfortunately, the new reality.

Role accounts, ESPs and commercial email

There was a discussion today on a marketing list about role accounts and marketing lists. Some ESPs block mail to role accounts, and the discussion was about why and if this is a good practice. In order to answer that question, we really need to understand role accounts a little more.

Filtering secret sauce

It seems one of the most asked questions I hear from people is about filters and what the secret sauce is.

You paid money for that?

I just got a call from someone claiming that I “filled out an online form” asking for more information about “an online education.” When pressed, the nice woman kept changing her story about who she was calling for or how she got my phone number. Eventually she admitted that they have a collection of 50 or more websites and it’s very possible that I didn’t give them my information directly.
She did want to reassure me that I had “no obligation to respond.”
How very thoughtful of her to reassure me that some random person giving her my corporate phone number does not obligate me to anything.
I don’t believe for a second that anyone who knows me signed me up to receive information. But I do appear to have gotten on some new mailing list recently. I’m getting a lot of ‘internship’ and ‘summer work’ offers in snail mail. These advertisements that are clearly targeting a different demographic than the one I belong to.
At least 4 companies (so far) seem to have paid good money for totally fake information about me. Of course, when they’re calling or sending me mail there’s no way I can stop it or fix it. I can’t even tell them their vendor is giving them bad information. I guess I just have to take comfort in the fact that they are wasting their money. I only wish they weren’t wasting my time as well.
This is just one example of why purchasing information, or trusting information filled into websites, is a bad idea. The company selling my information makes their profit and it doesn’t matter that their information is bad. If it really was someone filling in my information, that person is wasting the company’s time.
I’ve worked with marketers long enough to know that they just consider the bad data a cost of doing business. Data integrity just isn’t relevant to making a profit. Send enough email, send enough postcards, ring enough phones and profit appears. Even if their targets aren’t what they were sold.

Transactional advertising

CitiReceipt_modified_small One of the things our bank does that I really like is send ATM receipts directly to the email address associated with the ATM card. No more random pieces of paper I have to track down, it’s all there in my mailbox. This week I noticed that the bank is leveraging the transactional mail to tell me about new services they provide.
I think this is awesome. I get my receipt and I get to learn about bank services I didn’t know about previously.
I don’t remember if the bank made me confirm my address when I signed up for online banking, it was a long time ago. But if they did, then they have a dedicated, confirmed advertising channel right to my mailbox. Good for them, convenient for me.
A win-win.

In an effort to more closely observe the group’s buying habits and personal behaviors, a growing number of corporations are turning to tag and release programs to study American consumers, sources confirmed Friday. The Onion
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Authenticating with SPF: -all or ~all

What is SPF?

Sender policy framework (SPF, RFC 7208) is an authentication process that ties the 5321.from (also known as the mail from, envelope from or return path) to authorized sending IP addresses. This authorization is published in a TXT record in DNS. Receivers can check SPF at the beginning of a SMTP transaction, compare the 5321.from domain to the connecting IP address and determine if that IP is authorized to transmit mail.

What are affiliate mailers?

Affiliate mailers collect email addresses and then rent access to those addresses out to 3rd parties. There are a wide range of vendors that fall into the affiliate category. Some vendors compile lists through co-registration, others compile lists themselves through website opt-ins and some affiliate vendors fulfill mailing requests by hiring affiliates. There are, of course, some senders in the affiliate space that don’t even pretend to send opt-in mail, they just buy, compile or harvest addresses and blast mail to those addresses.