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Summer 2017: Moving so fast

It’s been a busy summer so far! If you’ve been too busy to read the blog regularly, here’s an early summer wrap up of our posts from May and June.

A small but significant part of our consulting practice is helping people with delivery crisis situations, such as figuring out what to do if you’re listed on Spamhaus or other block lists, or getting delisted at AT&T. People also ask very specific questions about things like text to image ratio. We answer these directly for clients, on the blog generally, and in my Ask Laura column.
Most of what we do, however, is larger strategic work on creating smart email programs that are designed for deliverability. Our primary focus is to help marketers think about how to send email people want — and have asked — to receive. I went into detail on this in my post on how permissions trump metrics. We also help clients with what we call reading between the lines, or useful ways to think about collaboration between ESPs and their customers. Another enormous area of focus is helping people understand filters in a big picture — or gestalt — approach.
We also talk a lot about list purchasing, appending, and all the other ways people acquire email addresses without direct permission from recipients. Our most recent examples: a colleague who added me to a list they’d built from their LinkedIn contacts (using a wholly different email address), Steve’s experience trying to get hotel wifi, and lists passed between political campaigns. Spammers can generate lists that are “clean” enough to fool ESPs just long enough to get a send out the door.
Unwanted email is unwanted email, even when it’s in a B2B context. When someone reaches out “personally” to me to tell me how useful they think I will find their product or service for my business, that’s still SPAM, even if it’s coming from a personal address or a gmail address to try to get around filters. Even if it’s to say Hello from your LinkedIn BFF. Seriously?! More on permission here.
I often use unique email addresses when I interact with companies, and this shows me both when my address is purchased or shared without permission and when a company has a data breach. Sometimes this can be challenging to report, however, as illustrated (hilariously!) in my Shibboleet post.
In legislative news, the FTC would like to know if we still need CAN-SPAM, and other important feedback on the rule. Though it obviously has not entirely saved our inboxes from SPAM, there’s still a lot of good there. Our neighbors to the north have just announced a delay in one of the major provisions of their anti-SPAM legislation, the private right to action provision of CASL. Both the provision and the delay are interesting, so I went into some detail in my post.
Steve wrote several posts about DMARC, starting with The Philosophy of DMARC, which goes into detail about how the method evolved and the thinking behind it. He followed up with another lengthy post about how DMARC breaks, and a solution for that, the Authenticated Received Chain (ARC). He also posted a message from Fedex as an illustration of how DMARC doesn’t fix phishing.
In fact, phishing just keeps getting more and more sophisticated. And sadly, it seems that senders are not necessarily getting smarter in response.
Steve also wrote about how you can figure out (more or less) if a sender is using DKIM. He also added a useful explanation of protocol-relative URLs in email.
In industry news, I added some detailed information from AOL on the final bits of the Verizon migration and a note about how to handle bounces with disappearing domains.
The best part of my early summer was speaking on a few panels at the ESPC meeting and celebrating the one year anniversary of our Women of Email network with an in-person board meeting in Las Vegas. As someone who works mostly remotely, I very much enjoy coming together with colleagues to connect in person and share ideas and stories. Let me know if you know of any interesting events I should attend later this year.

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Active buttons in the subject line

This morning I waded into a twitter discussion with a bunch of folks about some issues they were having with delivery to gmail. The discussion started with a blog post at detailed.com describing how some senders are seeing significant drops in open rates. I thought I’d take a look and see if I can help, because, hey, this is an interesting problem.
I signed up for a bunch of the mail that was seeing gmail problems and discovered that one of them had the confirmation link in the subject line. How cool is that?

I’ve known about the Gmail subscription line functionality for a while, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in the wild.
The action is in a <div> tag at the bottom of the email. Gmail has been allowing actions in subject lines for a while, this is just the first time I’ve seen it used for subscriptions. It’s so cool.
Want to add one to your post? Instructions are available from Google on their Email Markup pages.

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5 steps for addressing deliverability issues

Following on from my reading between the lines post I want to talk a little bit about using the channels. From my perspective the right way to deal with 99% of issues is through the front door.
Last week I found myself talking to multiple folks in multiple fora (emailgeeks slack channel, mailop, IRC) about how to resolve blocking issues or questions. All too often, folks come into these spaces and start by asking “does anyone know someone at…” Fundamentally, that’s the wrong first question. Even if the answer is yes. It’s even the wrong question if a representative of the company is on the list where you’re asking for help.
If that’s the wrong question, what is the right question? Where can we start to get help with issues when we’re stuck trying to fix a delivery problem we don’t understand?

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Happy Fourth

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Reading between the lines

Reading between the lines an important skill in deliverability.
Why? Over the last few years there’s been an increasing amount of collaboration between deliverability folks at ESPs and ISPs. This is great. It’s a vast improvement on how things were 10 years ago. However, there are still ongoing complaints from both sides. There probably always will be. And it’s not like a blog post from me is going to fix anything. But I see value in talking a bit about how we can improve our ability to collaborate with one another.

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Delisting at ATT

ATT used to have a webform to use to request delisting. I’ve heard reports over the last few months that the form isn’t working. This week, the website hosting the form disappeared. I don’t know for sure, but this looks like this is either deliberate or there’s just no one in charge of the site and it got lost.
ATT provides an email address for delisting, too. Unfortunately, I’m also hearing they’re not responding to that address. There are two possible reasons. One, they’ve never answered and they just delist or not depending on stats. Two, they’re not monitoring that address, either.
In any case, the delisting isn’t working and I don’t know when it will be. I know some people have contacted ATT reps, so they are aware of the current issues. More as I find out.

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Help! We're on Spamhaus' list

While trying to figure out what to write today, I checked Facebook. Where I saw a post on the Women of Email group asking for help with a Spamhaus listing. I answered the question. Then realized that was probably useable on the blog. So it’s an impromptu Ask Laura question.

We’re listed on Spamhaus’ list, any advice on how to get off? Our email provider has a plan, just looking for more input. 
If you’re on the SBL, there’s a problem (somewhere) with your data collection process. You’re getting addresses that don’t actually belong to your customers / subscribers / whatever.
The fastest way off it to cut WAY back on who you are mailing to. Mail only to addresses you know, for sure, based on activity in the email, want your mail. Then you can start to go through the other addresses and make decisions about how to verify that those addresses belong to the people you think they do.
If you’re at an ESP, do what they tell you to do. Most ESPs have dealt with this before.
One thing to think about, once you get past the crisis stage, is that if you’re on the SBL, it’s likely your delivery is overall pretty bad. These aren’t folks that dramatically list for a single mistake, there’s a pattern. ISPs look at different patterns, but will often find the same answers and delivery will be bad.
It’s important to realize that Spamhaus has 4 or 5 different lists that have different listing criteria. This is for the SBL, there’s also CSS, CBL, PBL, DBL and XBL. They address different problems and have different listing and delisting criteria.

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Filtering by gestalt

One of those $5.00 words I learned in the lab was gestalt. We were studying fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and, at the time, there were no consistent measurements or numbers that would drive a diagnosis of FAS. Diagnosis was by gestalt – that is by the patient looking like someone who had FAS.
It’s a funny word to say, it’s a funny word to hear. But it’s a useful term to describe the future of spam filtering. And I think we need to get used to thinking about filtering acting on more than just the individual parts of an email.

Filtering is not just IP reputation or domain reputation. It’s about the whole message. It’s mail from this IP with this authentication containing these URLs.  Earlier this year, I wrote an article about Gmail filtering. The quote demonstrates the sum of the parts, but I didn’t really call it out at the time.

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Delete or read?

This week I attended a Data Visualization workshop presented by the Advanced Media Center at UC Berkeley. Every year I set at least one professional development goal; this year it’s learning how to better communicate visually.

Part of the class included other resources, which led me to Nathan Yau’s website. One of the articles on the front page of his site is titled “Email Deletion Flow Chart.” Well, of course I had to read the post.

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FTC solicits CAN-SPAM feedback

The FTC (US Federal Trade Commission) is soliciting comments on CAN-SPAM legislation:
A. General Issues

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