Recent Posts

Change is coming…

A lot of email providers are rolling out changes to their systems. Some of these changes are so they will comply with GDPR. But, in other cases, the changes appear coincidental with GDPR coming into effect.
It seems, finally, some attention is being paid to the mail client. Over the last few years the webmail providers have tried to upgrade their interface. Many of the upgrades are about managing high volumes of email in a more efficient manner. Google uses tabs while Microsoft has sweep and focused inbox.
It’s about time the mail client got an overhaul. My Apple mail client doesn’t look all that different from the desktop client I was using back in the late 90s on OS/2 Warp back in the late 90s. In some ways the OS/2 client was actually more functional. And, well, I do miss a lot of the flexibility of mutt in the shell.
Today, Google announced to Google Suite administrators that they would be rolling out a major client overhaul. G Suite admins who want to can join the early adopter program in the coming week. Techcrunch has a sketch of what the new mailbox layout looks like, done by someone who says they saw a Google engineer working on a train.
What’s interesting about the sketch is it seems tabs are going away. Given how many senders hate tabs I’m sure this is a welcome relief. We’ll see, though, if there’s not more inbox management built into the new client or not. The nifty new features are “snooze” – hide this email for some period of time and bring it back at some point in the future. The other big thing is calendar access right from the mail client.
I expect, too, that as OATH: brings the Yahoo and AOL mailboxes under one banner, there will also be some changes there. All of this amounts to more uncertainty in the email delivery space. But we’ll get through, we always do.

Brand indicators in email

A number of companies in the email industry have been working on a way to better identify authenticated emails to users. One proposal is Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). A couple weeks ago, Agari announced a pilot program with some brands and a number of major consumer mail providers. These logos should be available in the Yahoo interface now and will be rolling out at other providers.

Updating the filtering model

One thing I really like about going to conferences is they’re often one of the few times I get to sit and think about the bigger email picture. Hearing other people talk about their marketing experiences, their email experiences, and their blocking experiences usually triggers big picture style thoughts.
Earlier this week I was at Activate18, hosted by Iterable. The sessions I attended were interesting and insightful. Of course, I went to the deliverability session. While listening to the presentation, I realized my previous model of email filtering needed to be updated.

A Minute of Email

Vala from Salesforce shared this infographic this morning.

(from Statista)
It estimates that in one minute on the 2017 Internet there were 25,000 tweets, 3.8 million google searches, 29 million SMS messages and 156 million emails sent.
Email is still a pretty vibrant messaging channel.

AOL Postmaster page changes

AOL has disabled the IP reputation check and the rDNS lookup on their postmaster pages. Given AOL isn’t handling the first mail hop any longer, this makes perfect sense. They simply don’t have the kind of data they did when they were handling mail directly from the sender MTA.
There’s no information, yet, on whether or not that functionality will be added / replicated over at Yahoo.

How long does it take to change reputation at Gmail?

Today I was chatting with a potential client who is in the middle of a frustrating warmup at Gmail. They’re doing absolutely the right things, it’s just taking longer than anyone wants. That’s kinda how it is with Gmail, while their algorithm can adapt quickly to changes. Sometimes, like when you’re warming up or trying to change a bad reputation, it can take 3 – 4 weeks to see any direct progress.This is a screenshot of IP reputation on Google Postmaster Tools. The sender made some significant changes in mail sending on some of their IP addresses starting in mid to late December. You can see, that the tools noticed and the reputation of those IPs bad to good fairly rapidly. It took a few more weeks of consistent sending for those two IPs to switch to yellow. And it took around another month for the reputation to flip to high.
Because this company is doing all the right things, and they’re seeing (as they describe it) some small amounts of improvement, I told them to give it another couple weeks. If they weren’t happy with their progress I could help them. But, frankly, until we can tell if this is something other than a normal warmup there isn’t much else to do.
When I got off the phone I felt very much like a doctor telling a patient to take two aspirin and call me in the morning. But, honestly, sometimes that is the right answer. Give it time.

Spam isn't going away

I got a piece of B2B spam last week that showed in several different ways why spam isn’t going away any time soon.
Systemic problems dealing with abuse at scale at Google. Ethics problems at Cloudflare. Problems dealing with abuse at scale at Amazon. Cultural problems in India, several times over.
Buckle up.

Yahoo fixed

The Yahoo bounce problem has been resolved. There were erroneous ‘554: this user does not have a yahoo.com account’ between March 14 and March 16. If you attempted to send mail and received this bounce during that time you can reactivate the address in your database. Most ESPs should be able to help you with this.
Moving forward, though, these bounces are valid and addresses should be removed from your list according to standard data hygiene processes.

The data are what they are

I’ve had a lot less opportunity to blog at the recent M3AAWG conference than I expected. Some of it because of the great content and conversations. Another piece has to do with lack of time and focus to edit and refine a longer post prompted by the conference. The final issue is the confidential nature of what we talk about.
With that being said, I can talk about a discussion I had with different folks over the looking at A/B testing blog post from Mailchimp. The whole post is worth a quick read, but the short version is when you’re doing A/B testing, design the test so you’re testing the relevant outcomes. If you are looking for the best whatever to get engagement, then your outcome should be engagement. If you’re looking for the best thing to improve revenue, then test for revenue.
Of course, this makes perfect sense. If you do a test, the test should measure the outcome you want. Using a test that looks at engagement and hoping that translates to revenue is no better than just picking one option at random.
That particular blog post garnered a round of discussion in another forum where folks disagreed with the data. To listen to the posters, the data had to be wrong because it doesn’t conform to “common wisdom.” The fact that data doesn’t conform to common wisdom doesn’t make that data wrong. The data is the data. It may not answer the question the researcher thought they were asking. It may not conform to common wisdom. But barring fraud or massive collection error, the data are always that. I give Mailchimp the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how they collect data as I know they have a number of data scientists on staff. I’ve also talked with various employees about digging into their data.
At the same time the online discussion of the Mailchimp data was happening, there was a similar discussion happening at the conference. A group of researchers got together to ask a question. They did their literature review, they stated their hypothesis, they designed the tests, they ran the tests. Unfortunately, despite this all being done well, the data showed that their test condition had no effect. The data were negative. They asked the question a different way, still negative. They asked a third way and still saw no difference between the controls and the test.
They presented this data at the conference. Well, this data went against common wisdom, too, and many of the session participants challenged the data. Not because it was collected badly, it wasn’t, but because they wanted it to say something else. It was the conference session equivalent of data dredging or p-hacking.

Overall, the data collected in any test from a simple marketing A/B testing through to a phase III clinical trial, is the answer to the question you asked. But just having the data doesn’t always make the next step clear. Sometimes the question you asked isn’t what you tested. This doesn’t mean you can retroactively find signal in the noise.
Mailchimp’s research shows that A/B testing for open rates doesn’t have any affect on revenue. If your final goal is to know which copy or subject line makes more revenue, then you need to test for revenue. No amount of arguing is going to change that data.

UPDATE: Spike in Yahoo unknown users

I still don’t have any solid information on the cause of the Yahoo bounces. I do know that folks inside Yahoo are looking into the issue.
However, multiple people (including my clients) are reporting that the addresses that are bouncing have very recent click and open activity. Other reports say these addresses deliver on a resend.
It looks like my advice yesterday was incorrect. I’m currently telling clients to continue mailing addresses for the time being.