One of the toughest deliverability problems to deal with is when mail is blocked or going to spam because the filters are working as intended. Often the underlying issue is a lack of permission. In the consumer space there are some thing the sender can do to change their metrics and get to the inbox. The reality is that a lot of companies who send to consumers can get good delivery even when they...
Last week, I talked about policy, using some different blocklist policies as examples. In that post I talked about how important it is that policy evolve. One example of that is how we’ve been evolving policy related to companies that get listed on Purchased Lists and ESPs. Who is listed has evolved over time, and we’re actually looking at some policy changes right now. Listing policy...
I had other posts in the pipeline, but saw a link to the Litmus 2017 State of Email Deliverability Report and decided that deserved a mention here. There’s all sorts of interesting data there, and well worth a download and read. I was, of course, interested in the “most problematic subscriber acquisition sources.” Senders having blocking issues or blacklist problems in the past...
Return Path released an white paper today offering the Secrets of Successful Senders. I don’t think any of my readers will be surprised that it boils down to identity, reputation, and engagement. Return Path treats these as separate things and I understand why they do. I think however, that the identity and reputation are supporting players to the overarching issue of engagement. When...
Spamhaus has listed a number of domains belonging to French politicians recently. In their blog post about it, they mention that the listings are directly related to address lists provided to candidates by the French government. We learned of this issue recently when two different French candidates became entangled in two of our automated spam detection systems, the DBL and the CSS. The...
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...
Dear Laura, I’ve been having a discussion with a colleague who is particularly frustrated by unwanted email he gets from retailers. Specifically, these are retailers who he’s never given an email address, but whose sites he’s browsed recently. He understands how retargeting works with web ads, but questions if it’s really acceptable to retarget in the email channel or if that violates CAN-SPAM or...
I wrote a few days ago about permission and how it was the key to getting into the inbox. It’s another one of those “necessary but not sufficient” parts of delivery. There are, however, a lot of companies who are using email without the recipient permission. These companies often contact me to help them solve their delivery problems. Often these are new companies who are trying...
Summer, already? Happy June! Here’s a look at our busy month of May. I had a wonderful time in Atlanta at the Salesforce Connections 2016 conference, where I spoke on a panel about deliverability. While in Atlanta, I also visited our friends at Mailchimp, and later spoke at the Email Innovations conference in Las Vegas, where I did my best to avoid “explaining all the things”. Since my speaking...
This morning I got spam from someone selling email addresses. The mail starts: Hi Laura, I am aware of your expertise in the field of marketing and how well you execute your campaigns. We specialize in customized email list services and provide global data. […] “You are receiving this email as you have shown interest in data related solutions. Occasionally you will receive brief messages...
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