When we talk about filters, we often think there is one filter. But, in many cases there are multiple stages of filters, each examining mail in a different way. In deliverability terms the easiest filters to ignore are the individual user filters. Mostly because there’s nothing we can do about those. These are the baysean style filters built into a lot of email clients as well as specific...
Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Justin Rao of Microsoft and David Reiley of Google (who met working at Yahoo) have teamed up to estimate the cost of spam to society relative to its worldwide revenues. The societal price tag comes to $20 billion. The revenue? A mere $200 million. As they note, that means that the “‘externality ratio’ of external costs...
There’s been quite a bit of traffic on twitter this afternoon about a recent blog post by Hubspot identifying trigger words senders should avoid in an email subject line. A number of email experts are assuring the world that content doesn’t matter and are arguing on twitter and in the post comments that no one will block an email because those words are in the subject line. As...
I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on various fora recently about increased delivery issues at Hotmail. Some senders are seeing more deferrals, some senders are seeing more mail in the bulk folder. Some senders aren’t seeing any changes. This leads me to believe that Hotmail made some adjustments to their filtering recently. Given some senders are unaffected, this appears to be a...
Content based filters are incredibly complex and entire books could be written about how they work and what they look at. Of course, by the time the book was written it would be entirely obsolete. Because of their complexity, though, I am always looking for new ways to explain them to folks. Content based filters look at a whole range of things, from the actual text in the message, to the...
A question came up on a mailing list about how long it typically took to resolve a spam block at an ISP. I don’t think that question actually has a single answer, as each ISP has their own, special, process. ISPA takes 5 minutes. You fill out a form, it runs through their automated system and you’re usually delisted. ISPB asks a lot of questions in their form, so it takes about 15...
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