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Domain management

Yesterday one of the bigger ESPs had their domain registration lapse. This caused a whole host of problems for their customers. It was resolved when someone completely unrelated to the company paid the registration fee.
It happens. Most of us know about cases where email or domains were lost due to renewal failures. The canonical case is one person at the company handles renewals, and leaves or is off when renewal comes up. The payment is missed, the domain goes back to the registrar and everything falls apart.
This happens at big companies and it happens at small companies. This is the kind of public facing problem that should make all of us look at how our own domains are managed. A few questions to ask.

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Healthcare, eh?

I’m deeply disappointed in the vote out of the Senate today.
We’re a small business. We have paid for our own health insurance since 2002. We’re very lucky – neither of us has any major issues. Before ACA went into effect I worried about what would happen if one of us were to become sick. Would we fall afoul of our lifetime limits? Due to a rare cancer, my mother hit those back before I graduated college. Would our coverage be pulled because I didn’t mention the broken wrist from when I was 3? There were so many questions, and so many unknowns.
I watched the cost of our insurance go up and up. We bought a house in the Bay Area, and our health insurance was nearly 2/3 of our mortgage payment. Every year the price went up a little more, and the benefits went down.
Then ACA happened. I could stop worrying about lifetime limits and rescission. Our premiums dropped by hundreds of dollars a month. The costs of our monthly prescriptions plummeted to near zero.
Then Trumpcare and massive amounts of turmoil in the markets. Our group provider cancelled our policy and I’ve spent the last two months or so working with insurance agents to get ourselves covered. Our provider gave us 60 days notice. It wasn’t enough to ensure continual coverage. We were finally approved last week, with better coverage and lower premiums than we were paying pre-ACA.
I worry, though, about what happens to us if Trumpcare passes. Will premiums go back to where they were preACA? Will the small business market just evaporate? I don’t need a tax cut near as much as I need to know that the healthcare markets will be stable.
I want to focus on the things I’m good at. I know there’s a certain amount of administrative overhead related to being a small business owner and that these things are unavoidable. But still, there doesn’t seem to be any real benefit to blowing up health care in this underhanded fashion.
We are some of the folks who will get a tax break – not a huge one but we will be a beneficiary. I don’t think it will be enough to counter the jump in premiums – even if the premiums just go back to where they were pre-ACA.
I know policy is hard; I do it for a living. I know it’s not fun to watch the sausage being made – I grew up in DC. ACA has issues. But from my point of view the current healthcare debate is doing nothing to actually fix the issues. Instead, they’re making everything worse. Long term? We have options and money; we’ll probably be fine. But there are a lot of people who don’t have the options we do, and they’re going to be hurt.
This is bad policy, bad lawmaking and bad for small businesses like mine.

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Implied permission

Codified into law in CASL, implied permission describes the situation where a company can legally mail someone. The law includes caveats and restrictions about when this is a legitimate assumption on the part of the company. It is, in fact, a kludge. There isn’t such a thing as implied permission. Someone either gives you permission to send them email or they don’t.
We use the term implied permission to describe a situation where the recipient didn’t actually ask for the mail, but isn’t that bothered about receiving it. The mail is there. If it has a particularly good deal the recipient might buy something. The flip side of not being bothered about receiving mail, is not being bothered about not receiving mail. If it’s not there, eh,  no biggie.

Implied permission isn’t real permission, no matter what the law says.
Now, many deliverability folks, including myself, understand that there are recipients who don’t mind getting mail from vendors. We know this is a valid and effective way of marketing. Implied permission is a thing and doesn’t always hurt delivery.
However, that does not mean that implied permission is identical to explicit permission. It’s one of the things I think CASL gets very right. Implied permission has a shelf life and expires. Explicit permission doesn’t have a shelf life.
Implied permission is real, but not a guarantee that the recipient really wants a particular email from a sender, even if they want other emails from that sender.

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I'm not a customer any more

We recently moved co-working spaces, after 8 or 9 years in the same place.  I’ll be up front here, we left Space A because I was annoyed with them. I’ve been increasingly unhappy with them for a while, but moving is a pain so just put up with them. But their most recent rent increase along with the lost packages, increasing deposit requirements and revolving door of incompetent staff finally drove us to find a new co-working space.
On the 15th of the last month of our contract, I started receiving marketing emails from Space A. I just deleted a couple of them but finally decided I didn’t want to ever see their name again. I tried to unsubscribe.

Gotta give them credit. Checkboxes for everything, except some of them are to opt-in and some of them are to opt-out. This is the kind of interface marketers use to confuse folks and limit the actual number of opt-outs. I’ll admit, the first time I tried to opt-out, I probably did it wrong. But, I know CAN SPAM says they have 10 days, and I know many marketers take advantage of that so I wait a while and keep deleting the messages that show up in my mailbox.
That was late June. By early July I realize it’s been more than 10 days and I’m still getting mail from them. So I click another opt-out link. This time I notice I need to uncheck most boxes, but check the bottom one. OK, fine, you got me, I didn’t read and didn’t correctly opt-out the first time. This time I will.
I continue to receive email. I continue to delete the email. We run our own mail system so I don’t have the benefit of a this-is-spam button, but you can bet if I did I would have used it, on every message I received after my first attempt to opt-out.
This week, after getting yet more mail, I start digging. What ESP are they using that’s bungling the opt-out process? Ah. I know that ESP. So I send in a complaint to abuse@ESP asking them to please make their customer stop mailing me. I also go, once again, to the preference page and submit an opt-out request. Because, hey, maybe third time is a charm?
12 hours later I get yet another mail from them. Really? REALLY? OK. Now I’m moving from annoyed to irate. First step: figure out if I know anyone working at said ESP. Ah, right, them. I have a lot of respect for this colleague, so I send a heads up pointing out that their customer isn’t honoring unsubscribes and can they take a look at what might have broken in their unsubscribe process.
This morning they tell me they looked into my subscription and have not registered any opt-out request until the one this week. The other two? Not recorded in their system. “Does this match your recollection of what happened?” No. No it doesn’t. I know I clicked on unsub links at least 3 times and only one of those clicks is recorded.
At this point, I’m pretty sure I’ll be suppressed by the ESP so I won’t have to get mail from Space A any longer. That fixes the annoyance on my end. But I can’t help thinking about how horrible this interaction was, both from a deliverability perspective and from a customer perspective.

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Online communities and abuse

A few weekends ago we met a friend for coffee in Palo Alto. As the discussion wandered we ended up talking about some of the projects we’re involved in. Friend mentioned she was working with a group building a platform for community building. We started talking about how hard it is these days to run online groups and communities. One of the things I started discussing was what needed to be built into communities like this to prevent abuse and damage.

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5 answers you need before mailing old addresses.

From the archives: Mailing old addresses: 5 questions to ask first
James asked the question on twitter:

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People are the weakest link

All of the technical security in the world won’t fix the biggest security problem: people. Let’s face it, we are the weakest link. Adding more security doesn’t work, it only causes people to figure out ways to get around the security.

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Happy 80th Birthday to SPAM

Not the kind we hate. The other kind. That’s best served over sushi rice.
80 years of SPAM

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Searching for a new ESP?

250OK has compiled advice about what buyers should ask when looking at new ESPs. The advice from various folks is spot on.
Changing ESPs is a big undertaking, bigger than most people expect. It’s not like changing vendors for other services. It is a process and most of the time moving creates a short term dip in deliverability. I have a lot of theories and speculation as to why, but the evidence is pretty clear. I think Mike Hillyer summed it up best: “I think the most commonly missed question is ‘will changing ESPs truly affect the outcomes we are looking to change?’”
I also liked the answers to the question about using multiple ESPs. My view is that unless there are specific requirements for different mail streams the answer is no, don’t do it. And don’t think you can keep a “backup” ESP with “partially warmed IPs” and be able to turn it on as disaster recovery. Email doesn’t work that way.
It’s an article well worth a read.
 

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Engagement drives deliverability

Return Path released an white paper today offering the Secrets of Successful Senders. I don’t think any of my readers will be surprised that it boils down to identity, reputation, and engagement. Return Path treats these as separate things and I understand why they do. I think however, that the identity and reputation are supporting players to the overarching issue of engagement.

When I’m dealing with clients and troubleshooting deliverability problems and offering solutions, I focus on the root cause. To me the root cause is almost always a data problem. Either there’s a problem with data collection or there’s a problem with data maintenance. These problems result in mail going to people who don’t really want or care about it.
Yes, identity is important. But, realistically, anyone mailing through a decent ESP has SPF and DKIM in place, at least on some level. There may be better ways to authenticate, but the boxes are checked.
Yes, reputation is important. But here’s the thing, reputation just means that the ISP knows how users are going to react to an email. Reputation isn’t some nebulous concept made up by ISPs. It’s an actual measurement. It quantifies the history of an IP or a domain or a mail stream and says we know that this IP sends wanted mail. We know that this domain sends mail our users ignore. It’s a history. Past performance does indicate future results.
Identity says who a sender is. Reputation tells us that sender’s history of sending. Those are the two factors that enable ISPs to make delivery decisions. Mail comes in and the ISP looks at it. They use identity to determine what reputation to assign to a mail. Reputation drives delivery, whether into the inbox or the bulk folder.
 

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