I’ve seen reports that someone is asserting that utm=COVID19 in URLs results in all mail going to bulk at multiple ISPs. This is the type of thing that someone says is true and dozens of folks believe it and thus a “deliverability phact” is born. For a plethora of reasons, this doesn’t pass the sniff test. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. It’s...
In my previous career I was a molecular biologist. Much of my work was done on bacteria but after I left grad school, I ended up working in a developmental biology lab. Bacteria were (mostly) simple: just about every trait was controlled by a single gene. We could study what that gene did by removing it from the bacteria or adding it to a well characterised bacteria. When I moved to developmental...
Everyone has their own way of troubleshooting problems. I thought I would list out the steps I take when I’m trying to troubleshoot them. Clarify the problem. As a consultant, folks come to me asking me to help them solve their delivery problems. My first step is to get them to clarify what symptoms they’re seeing. Something happened to make them contact me, and that’s where we...
One of the ongoing recommendations to improve deliverability is to send email that is timely and relevant to the recipient. The idea being that if you send mail a recipient wants, they’re more likely to interact with it in a way that signals to the mailbox provider that the message is wanted. The baseline for that, at least whenever I’ve talked about timely and relevant, is that the...
I’ve seen a bunch of folks in different places looking for advice on what to do when they can’t get a response from a postmaster team, or a filtering company. I was all set to write yet another post about how silence is an answer. Digging through the archives, though, I see I’ve written about this twice already in the last 18 months. Well. OK then. Instead of retreading...
Much of the equipment and wires that the internet runs on is privately owned, nor is it a public utility in the traditional sense. The owners of the property have a lot of leeway to do what they like with that property. Yes, there are standards, but the standards are about interoperability. They describe things you have to do in order to exchange traffic with other entities. They do not dictate...
Recently, a significant majority of discussions of email delivery problems mention that neither the IPs or domains in use are on any of the public blocklists. I was thinking about this recently and realised that, sometime in the past, I stopped using blocklists as a source of useful information about reputation. I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. I just stopped checking most of the...
One of the delivery challenges that regularly comes up in various delivery discussion spaces is the “Gmail suddenly put my mail in spam.” From my perspective, there is rarely a “suddenly” about Gmail’s decision making process. As I was answering one of these questions I had a number of thoughts. I’ll share them here on the blog so I can find them in the future...
Have you heard about the Baader-Meinhoff effect? The Baader-Meinhof effect, also known as frequency illusion, is the illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias). Baader–Meinhof effect at Wikipedia There has to...
I’m sure by now readers have seen the article from Gmail “Spam does not bring us joy — ridding Gmail of 100 million more spam messages with TensorFlow.” If you haven’t seen it, go read it. It’s not often companies write about their filtering philosophy and what tools they’re using to manage incoming bad mail. There were a few parts of the article that...
RSS - Posts