It’s been one of those weeks where blogging is a challenge. Not because I don’t have much to say, but because I don’t have much constructive to say. Rants can be entertaining, even to write. But they’re not very helpful in terms of what do we need to change and how do we move forward. A few different things I read or saw brought out the rants this week. Some of these are...
Gmail has some extremely complex filters. They’re machine learning based and measure hundreds of things about incoming mail. The filters are continually adjusting to changes and updating how they treat specific mail. One consequence of continually adjusting machine learning filters is that filtering is not static. What passes to the inbox now, may not pass in a couple hours. One of the...
Spam filters aren’t perfect. They sometimes catch mail they shouldn’t, although it happens less than some people think. They sometimes fail to catch mail they should. One of the reason filters fail to catch mail they should is because some spammers invest a lot of time and energy in figuring out how to get past the filters. This is nothing new, 8 or 9 years ago I was in negotiations...
Tomorrow is the webinar Mythbusters: Deliverability vs. Engagement. This webinar brings together the ISP speakers from EEC15, plus Matt from Comcast, to expand on their comments. There’s been some confusion about the impact of engagement on delivery and whether or not senders should care about recipient engagement. My opinion on the matter is well known: recipient engagement drives delivery...
Massimo Arrigoni has a great blog post up summarizing the final session of the EEC conference with representatives from major mailbox providers. This session a number of representatives from major mailbox providers spoke about what it takes to get to the inbox. They discussed what engagement really was, why you need to warmup and what the mailbox providers are measuring. The short version is...
The team behind Google’s new Inbox app did an “Ask us Anything” Q&A with reddit on December 3rd. The team consisted of a Product Manager, Designer, and Software Engineer and for two hours the team answered all sorts of questions. Most of the questions were about new features or supporting additional email providers and it showed just how new this app is, it’s not quite ready to be your...
A throwback post from 2010 Attention is a limited resource. Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time. In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of...
Gmail is a challenge for even the best senders these days. With the recent Gmail changes there isn’t any clear fix to getting open rates or inbox delivery back up. Some of it depends on what is causing Gmail to filter the mail. Changing subject lines, from name, from address may get mail back to the inbox in the short term, but it only works until the filters catch up. What I am seeing...
IP reputation is a measure of how much wanted mail a particular IP address sends. This wanted mail is measured as a portion of the total email sent from that IP. Initially IP reputation was really the be all and end all of reputation, there was no real good way to authenticate a domain or a from address. Many ISPs built complex IP reputation models to evaluate mail based on the IP that sent the...
Over the last few months more and more marketers are finding their primary delivery challenge is the Gmail inbox. I’ve been thinking about why Gmail might be such a challenge for marketers. Certainly I have gotten a lot of calls from people struggling to figure out how to get into the Gmail inbox. I’ve also seen aggressive domain based filtering from Gmail, where any mention of a...
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