Much of the current deliverability advice focuses on a few key ideas: Authenticate your mail with SPF, DKIM and DMARC Use a dedicated IP. Monitor delivery. Clean your data. All of these things are absolutely things you should be doing, but senders can do all these things and still have cruddy delivery. These things are great and can help your mail deliver better. But they’re not enough to...
Many questions about delivery problems often assume that there is one standard email filter and the rules are the same across all of them. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case. The biggest divide is consumer versus business filters. Business filters don’t really care about things like engagement. A sender could have near perfect engagement with a message to a business. But a...
The more I look at the industry, the more convinced I am that we’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in how email is filtered. This shift will change how we handle email deliverability and what tools we have and what information we can use as senders to address challenges to getting to the inbox. Early deliverability This period is roughly between 2001 and 2006. Many of the email...
Mimecast is a filter primarily used by businesses. They’re fairly widely used. In some of the data analysis I’ve done for clients, they’re a top 10 or top 20 filter. Earlier today someone asked on Facebook if mimecast may be blocking emails based on the TLD. The short answer is it’s unlikely. I’ve not seen huge issues with them blocking based on TLD of the domain...
A c/p from an email I sent to a mailing list. I think we’re seeing a new normal, or are still on the pathway to a new normal. Here’s my theory. 1) Hotmail made a lot of underlying code changes, learning from 2 decades of spam filtering. They had a chance to write a new codebase and they took it. 2) The changes had some interesting effects that they couldn’t test for and didn’t expect. They spent...
It is a regular occurrence that senders ask filters and ISPs for mitigation. But there seems to be some confusion as to what mitigation really means. I regularly hear from senders who seem to think that once they’ve asked for mitigation that they don’t have to worry about filtering or blocking at that ISP for a while. They’re surprised when a few weeks or even days after they...
Because that’s what the spam folder is for unsolicited email. Sending cold email, particularly in bulk (and let’s be honest, if it weren’t sent in bulk, no one would know or care about it going to spam) is spamming. This is exactly the kind of mail that the bulk folder is designed to catch. Senders that don’t have permission have no path out of the bulk folder except...
I was doing some research today for an article I’m working on. The research led me to a San Francisco Law Review article from 2001 written by David E. Sorkin. Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Electronic Mail (.pdf link). The text itself is a little outdated, although not as much as I expected. There’s quite a good discussion of various ways to control spam, most of which...
Dear Laura, I sometimes get in arguments with clients where I say, “your open rate is 3%, you need to do some list pruning” and they say, “my recipient list is 100% b2b, and b2b filters don’t care about engagement, so it doesn’t matter if my list is really old and unengaged.” This is wrong in cases where the business is using Outlook or Gsuite, both of which are going to care if they see...
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...
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