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...
I use tom@hotmail.com as my default bogus email address. Tom has subscribed to so many things because of me. This is why address verification doesn’t work. The address tom@hotmail.com is a real address. It exists. It accepts mail. And at least one person admits to signing up Tom for mail that the person doesn’t want. I’m sure he’s not the only one. <- 250 OK -> MAIL...
Back in the dark ages of email delivery the only thing that really mattered to get your email into the inbox was having a good IP reputation. If your IP sent good mail most of the time, then that mail got into the inbox and all was well with the world. All that mattered was that good IP reputation. Even better for the people who wanted to game the system and get their spam into the inbox, there...
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...
Earlier this week Gmail announced they were providing reasons for why they delivered a particular mail to the bulk folder. I’m sure a lot of senders are rejoicing over the clear feedback. After all this is exactly what they’ve been asking for “tell us why you’re filtering our mail and we’ll fix it.” I am not sure, however, that this is going to help the...
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 had a lot of people ask me about what I mean by email fingerprinting. It means that I’m able to tell these 4 emails were all sent by the same entity. The domains are (mostly) different, the To: addresses are different, but I get hundreds of these emails a day. Different domains, different products, different to: addresses, different sending IPs. But clearly the same sender for...
There are a number of different things delivery experts can do help senders improve their own delivery. Yes, I said it: senders are responsible for their delivery. ESPs, delivery consultants and deliverability experts can’t fix delivery for senders, they can only advise. In my own work with clients, I usually start with making sure all the technical issues are correct. As almost all spam...
RSS - Posts