Gmail’s approach to filtering; as described by one of the old timers. This person was dealing with network abuse back when I was still slinging DNA around as my job and just reading headers as a hobby. Gmail uses a 10+ year old neural network that analyzes thousands of factors, related to email, IP, and web, integrated with all Google products, and with 99.9%+ accuracy for identifying...
Sharing access to Google Postmaster Tools
As a delivery consultant, I always ask clients to share their Google postmaster reports with me. As Gmail is one of the bigger delivery challenges for a lot of senders, having access to the postmaster tools helps tease out issues. I had some issues earlier this week getting access to tools and so brought up a conversation on one of the delivery lists. The nice folks there helped me get it solved...
December 2016: The Month in Email
Happy New Year! We’re looking forward to some interesting new projects this year, both for our clients and for Word to the Wise. Stay tuned! December was a slow month for blogging, with everything going on. But we’re back on the horse now and ready to blog for 2017. List and subscription management continue to be hot topics, especially in the wake of the listbombing attacks earlier this...
Poor delivery at Gmail but no where else
I’ve mentioned before that I can often tell what ISP is making filter changes by what my calls are about. The last few weeks it’s been Gmail where folks are struggling to get to the inbox. One of the things most clients and potential clients have mentioned is that they’re not having any problems at the other major ISPs. Gmail’s filters are probably the most extensive and...
Parasites hurt email marketing
As a small business owner I am a ripe target for many companies. They buy my address from some lead generation firm, or they scrape it off LinkedIn, and they send me a message that pretends to be personalized but isn’t really. “I looked at your website… we have a list of email addresses to sell you.” “We offer cold calling services… can I set up a call with you...
iOS List Unsubscribe Functionality
Al did a great post over on Spamresource about the how the new list unsubscribe function in the default mail client from iOS10. What’s been interesting to me is how much I’m hearing from ESP folks about how their customers want it gone. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, in the default mail client on iOS10, Apple is now offering a way to unsubscribe from list mail...
Mail Client Improvements
There’s been extensive and ongoing development of email through the years, but much of it has been behind the scenes. We were focused on the technology and safety and robustness of the channel. We’re not done yet, but things are much better than they were. The good part of that is there is some space to make improvements to the inbox as well. Over the last few months there have been a...
Responsive design just got easier at Gmail
Today Gmail announced they are supporting media queries in Gmail and Google Inbox. This should simplify the creation of emails for multiple platforms. The full list of supported rules can be found on the Google Developer Site.
Gmail showing authentication results to endusers
A bit of older news, but worth a blog post. Early in August, Gmail announced changes to the inbox on both the web interface and the android client. They will be pushing authentication results into the interface, so end users can see which emails are authenticated. These are not deliverability changes, the presence or absence of authentication will not affect inbox delivery. And the gmail Gmail...
Gmail / Apps authentication issues
I’ve seen several reports of unexpected rejections for unauthenticated email to Google over IPv6 today. Unauthenticated mail over IPv6 is a bad idea, but Google usually spam folders it rather than rejecting it. The Gmail status dashboard is reporting an issue “Some messages sent to consumer Gmail accounts are being rejected due to authentication enforcement” so something...