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Anyone know why…

Countless questions about email troubleshooting start with “does anyone know why.” Unfortunately, most of these questions don’t contain enough detail to get a useful answer.

In the case of email, even the smallest redactions, like the IP address and the domain in question, can make it difficult for anyone to provide help. Details matter.
Every detail matters, sending IP and domain are just the beginning. 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? Is the mail going to the bulk folder or being rejected? What ISPs or filters are involved?
The relevant questions go on and on and on.
We send fairly detailed question lists to clients. I regularly look at them to try and make them shorter. But the reality is these are questions that are relevant. Without enough information we simply cannot troubleshoot delivery problems.

How to hire an affiliate

Yesterday I talked about all the reasons that using affiliate email can hurt overall delivery. In some cases, though, marketing departments and the savvy email marketer don’t have a choice in the matter. Someone in management makes a decision and employees are expected to implement it.
If you’re stuck in a place where you have to hire an affiliate, how can you protect the opt-in marketing program you’ve so painstakingly built? Nothing is foolproof, but there are some ways you can screen affiliates.

Affiliate marketing overview

Most retailers have realized that sending unsolicited email is bad for their overall deliverability. Still, the idea they can send mail to people who never heard of them is seductive.
Enter affiliate email. That magical place where companies hire an agency, or a contractor, or some other third party to send email advertising their new product. Their mail and company reputation is protected because they aren’t sending the messages. Even better, affiliates assure their customers that the mail is opt-in. I’m sure some of them even believe it.
The reality is a little different from what affiliates and their customers want to believe.

SNDS issues and new Gmail

A bunch of folks reported problems with Microsoft’s SNDS page earlier today. This afternoon, our friendly Microsoft rep told the mailop mailing list that it should be fixed. If you see problems again, you can report it to mailop or your ESP and the message will get shared to the folks who can fix it.
The other big thing that happened today was Gmail rolled out their new inbox layout.
It’s… nice. I’ll be honest, I am not a big gmail user and have never been a huge fan. I got my first account way-back-during-the-beta. I used it to handle some of my mailing list mail. I could never work out how to get it to stop breaking threads by deciding to put some mail into the junk folder. I just gave up and went back to my shell with procmail (now sieve) scripts. I still have a couple lists routed to my gmail account, and the filtering is much improved – I can at least tell it to never bulk folder certain email.
The feature I’m really interested in is the confidential, expiring email. I’m interested in how that’s going to work with non-Gmail accounts. Within Gmail makes perfect sense, but I don’t think Gmail can control mail once it’s off their system.

My best guess is that Gmail will end up sending some type of secure link to recipients using non-Gmail mail servers. The message itself will stay inside Google and recipients will only be able to view mail through the web. That’s how the vast majority of secure mail systems work.
If anyone has the secure message already, feel free to send me a secure message. I’ll report back as to how it works.

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.

No, I won't rate you!

Brick and mortar stores have tried to use feedback as a means of driving customer engagement for a while. Anyone who’s shopped at a big chain here in the US knows what I mean. You buy a pack of gum and end up with a 2 foot long receipt. At the bottom of the receipt there is a URL and bar code. The cashier circles the bar code and cheerfully tells you to go online and tell corporate about their service.
If you go to the website, they ask you for specific specific purchase information (time, date, store number, amount, cashier) and ask a bunch of questions about the store. Then, they offer you a chance to win something (gift card, something) if you’ll provide them with your personal information.
Note: This particular form does not allow you to continue at all unless you’ve filled in the information request. Even if you check “prefer not to answer” the page throws up an error message and tells you to provide a valid phone number.
More recently email marketers have jumped on the asking for feedback bandwagon. Over the last few weeks multiple companies have sent me emails asking how my visit to their website was. It… was a website? I mean I went to your website and checked my credit card bill, it told me how much I owed. Your tech support told me they couldn’t fix my problem over chat, I’d have to take my laptop in for repairs. My package arrived and if it didn’t you can be sure I would have reached out to you.
And it’s not just online services that do this. Hotels send followup surveys, which if you’re a frequent traveler turns into a full time job. Yes, I visited your hotel it’s very nice. If I’m in town and that’s where the conference I’m attending is hosted, I’ll probably be back.
I get it, the more chances you provide for people to interact with your brand the more engaged they are and the more likely they are to purchase from you. But a simple search of my mailbox shows over a dozen messages from companies over the last few weeks, all of them asking me for feedback on their services. I’d like a little less email, please. The bank, the mortgage company, the credit card company, the food delivery service I used, the clothing website, the travel website, the ride share service, the hotel… the list goes on and on.
If only a few companies did this, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But as more and more companies adopt the triggered email followup (and the followup reminder and the final reminder and the final final reminder), recipients are going to get tired of the messages. Some of the requests don’t even have opt-outs, although the majority of the ones in my mailbox do.
I get that each company is only responsible for the mail they, in particular, are sending. But the user has a different frame of reference, and maybe it’s time to consider that using surveys and triggered emails to drive engagement may not be a long term sustainable business model. The rest of the companies out there using the same strategy are going to ruin it for everyone.

Laposte rejections

Update: The issue seems to have been resolved and Laposte say they’re no longer sending the 519 responses as of April 25th 2018.
Laposte.net are having a bad couple of weeks. There’ve been reports from customers of their IMAP service being unusable, with attempts to move or delete messages timing out and expected emails simply not arriving.
Several delivery friends have mentioned that they’re rejecting mail with errors that look like this:

GDPR and the EU and Opt-in Confirmation

There’s a lot of discussion going on about just what GDPR requires, and of who, and in which jurisdictions. German organizations in particular have been more aggressive than most about wanting to see opt-in confirmation for years and now seem to be adding “because GDPR” to their arguments.
I’m still not sure how this is going to shake out, but I’m beginning to see list owners take externally visible action.

I’ve been a subscriber for four or five years – it’s a good mailing list, run well, and I doubt it has any delivery issues beyond the unavoidable.
So this is a permission pass solely because they’re not sure whether I’m an EU resident, and aren’t 100% sure their opt-in confirmation data is squeaky clean (I subscribed as part of downloading an app of theirs, but after five years I couldn’t tell you whether that was technically confirmed opt-in or not, and I’m sure they can’t either).
Zoomdata aren’t taking any chances on confirmation. This isn’t a single “click to confirm you want to stay on the list” permission pass, rather it goes to a form that asks whether I’m an EU resident and if I am requires me to check an “Opt-in to email communications” checkbox and then click on a link in a confirmation email.
I’m not an EU resident today but may be an EU resident in the near future – yet my email address won’t change and nor will my mailing list subscriptions. That does make me wonder how valid it is to be capturing opt-in permission solely for recipients who are EU residents today.
Also are non-EU residents likely to claim they live in the EU because they’ll be treated better as far as their privacy is concerned, much the same as telling Facebook or Twitter you live in Germany provides you with better content filters?
I guess I’ll be seeing more of this in my inbox over the next few weeks. How are all y’all handling GDPR compliance?

Don't bother unsubscribing

In the early years of the spam problem, a common piece of advice was to never unsubscribe. At the time, this made a lot of sense. Multiple anti-spammers documented spammers harvesting addresses from unsubscribe forms. This activity tapered off around 2000 or so, although the myth persisted for much longer.

These days, there isn’t much harm in unsubscribing. I even spent a full month unsubscribing from spam at one of my dormant accounts (Yes, spam is still a problem). While the graph shows an initial increase in spam, levels dropped for the next few months. By the time I cancelled the account in 2017, spam levels were at very low. I don’t know if the decrease was due to the unsubscribing or if there were improvements in the filtering appliance the ISP used.
More recently the biggest problem is senders that don’t honor unsubscribes. There are a lot of reasons this can happen and they’re not all malicious. Still, too many companies don’t care enough to actually make sure their unsubscribe process is working. I’ve had way too many companies “lose” unsubscribe requests, sometimes years after I asked them to stop. I expect many of these cases are accidents. They switch ESPs and decide or forget or otherwise fail to transfer unsubscribes to the new ESP. But, in other cases, there doesn’t seem to be any ESP change. It appears the companies think that they can reactivate unsubscribes at some point (pro tip: there is no expiration on legally required unsubscribe requests).
All of this leads to my current recommendation: yeah, unsub if you feel like it, it’s unlikely to hurt, and it’s possible it will help. But, don’t expect them to actually work permanently. Companies just don’t care enough to make them permanent.

Widespread Microsoft phishing warnings today

People throughout the industry are reporting phishing notices in a lot of mail going through Microsoft properties this morning. I even got one in an email from one of my clients earlier today

Multiple people have talked to employees inside Microsoft, and I suspect their customers have been blowing up support about this. I know they’re aware, I suspect they’re frantically working on a fix.
Update 11 am PDT: It appears this filter is firing when mail has the word “hotmail” in it. This includes if non displaying text (like CSS) has the word in it. It feels like they were attempting to mitigate something and wrote a rule that wasn’t quite right. Still no word on a fix, but don’t panic.
Update 12:30 PDT: Reports are that the warning is gone. No word from Microsoft, but as long as things get fixed we don’t need it.