FBLs

Are Complaints Weighted?

I’ve been doing a lot of my question answering over on the Email Geeks slack and have decided to bring some of the answers over here. Today’s question:

History

Return Path was a major driver for the establishment of Feedback Loops (FBLs) back in the mid to late 2000s. They worked with a number of ISPs to help them set up FBLs and managed the signup and validation step for them. In return for providing this service to senders and receivers, they used this data as part of their certification process and their deliverability consulting. Return Path had a strong corporate ethos of improving the overall email ecosystem that originated from the CEO and permeated through the whole organization.

The inbox is a moving target

The more I look at the industry, the more convinced I am that we’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in how email is filtered. This shift will change how we handle email deliverability and what tools we have and what information we can use as senders to address challenges to getting to the inbox.

Happy 2018

This is the time of year when everyone starts posting their predictions for the coming year. Despite over a decade of blogging and close to 2500 blog posts, I have’t consistently written prediction articles here. Many years I don’t see big changes on the horizon, so there’s not a lot to comment on. Incremental changes are status quo, nothing earth shattering there. But I’ve been thinking about what might be on the horizon in 2018 and how that will affect email marketing.

RoadRunner FBL goes kaput

Road Runner is no longer providing a FBL starting today. Earlier this morning a couple ESPs were reporting a decrease in FBL messages from the RR FBL. A few hours later, a senior technical account manager confirmed on mailop that the FBL was ending today.
While the announcement says that folks can expect reports to trickle, at least one ESP has reported zero reports today.

Improving Gmail Delivery

Lately I’m hearing a lot of people talk about delivery problems at Gmail. I’ve written quite a bit about Gmail (Another way Gmail is different, Gmail filtering in a nutshell, Poor delivery at Gmail but no where else, Insight into Gmail filtering) over the last year and a half or so. But those articles all focus on different parts of Gmail delivery and it’s probably time for a summary type post.

I'm not a customer any more

We recently moved co-working spaces, after 8 or 9 years in the same place. I’ll be up front here, we left Space A because I was annoyed with them. I’ve been increasingly unhappy with them for a while, but moving is a pain so just put up with them. But their most recent rent increase along with the lost packages, increasing deposit requirements and revolving door of incompetent staff finally drove us to find a new co-working space.
On the 15th of the last month of our contract, I started receiving marketing emails from Space A. I just deleted a couple of them but finally decided I didn’t want to ever see their name again. I tried to unsubscribe.

Gotta give them credit. Checkboxes for everything, except some of them are to opt-in and some of them are to opt-out. This is the kind of interface marketers use to confuse folks and limit the actual number of opt-outs. I’ll admit, the first time I tried to opt-out, I probably did it wrong. But, I know CAN SPAM says they have 10 days, and I know many marketers take advantage of that so I wait a while and keep deleting the messages that show up in my mailbox.
That was late June. By early July I realize it’s been more than 10 days and I’m still getting mail from them. So I click another opt-out link. This time I notice I need to uncheck most boxes, but check the bottom one. OK, fine, you got me, I didn’t read and didn’t correctly opt-out the first time. This time I will.
I continue to receive email. I continue to delete the email. We run our own mail system so I don’t have the benefit of a this-is-spam button, but you can bet if I did I would have used it, on every message I received after my first attempt to opt-out.
This week, after getting yet more mail, I start digging. What ESP are they using that’s bungling the opt-out process? Ah. I know that ESP. So I send in a complaint to abuse@ESP asking them to please make their customer stop mailing me. I also go, once again, to the preference page and submit an opt-out request. Because, hey, maybe third time is a charm?
12 hours later I get yet another mail from them. Really? REALLY? OK. Now I’m moving from annoyed to irate. First step: figure out if I know anyone working at said ESP. Ah, right, them. I have a lot of respect for this colleague, so I send a heads up pointing out that their customer isn’t honoring unsubscribes and can they take a look at what might have broken in their unsubscribe process.
This morning they tell me they looked into my subscription and have not registered any opt-out request until the one this week. The other two? Not recorded in their system. “Does this match your recollection of what happened?” No. No it doesn’t. I know I clicked on unsub links at least 3 times and only one of those clicks is recorded.
At this point, I’m pretty sure I’ll be suppressed by the ESP so I won’t have to get mail from Space A any longer. That fixes the annoyance on my end. But I can’t help thinking about how horrible this interaction was, both from a deliverability perspective and from a customer perspective.

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.
A few hours later someone asked me how do I get access and I thought that was a brilliant idea for a blog post today.

Monitoring Your Mail Stream

One of the most important things for any mail sender to do is monitor their mail stream. There are a number of things that every mailer should pay attention to. Some are things to monitor during delivery, some are things to monitor after delivery. All of these things tell senders important information about how their mail is being received by their recipients and the ISPs.

Earthlink opens up FBL

Earlier this week I was at MAAWG and one of the Earthlink postmaster folks stopped me to tell me that Earthlink was now accepting non-ISP applications to their Feedback Loop.
In order to apply for the Earthlink FBL send an email to fblrequest@abuse.earthlink.net with the IP addresses and the FBL email address.

How difficult is it to get on whitelists?

Today’s question comes from Leslie J.

Just how difficult is it for a small business that runs a highly compliant mailing system to find
their way onto whitelists at the big freemail/spam filter providers?
It seems utterly impossible meaning man hours are completely wasted messing around with subjects and content when if the same business sends the very same message through any number of well know ESPs, the message will hit the inbox like the Mafia are in charge of the shooting match.
Read More

Dealing with complaints

There are a lot of people who abuse online services and use online services to abuse and harass other people. But handling complaints and handling the abuse are often afterthoughts for many new companies. They don’t think about how to accept and process complaints until they show up. Nor do they think about how bad people can abuse a system before hand.
But dealing with complaints is important and can be complicated. I’ve written many a complaint handling process document over the years, but even I was impressed with the Facebook flowchart that’s been passed around recently.

In the email space, though, all too many companies just shrug off complaints. They don’t really pay attention to what recipients are saying and treat complaints merely as unsubscribe requests. Their whole goal is to keep complaints below the threshold that gets them blocked at ISPs. To be fair, this isn’t as true with ESPs as it is with direct senders, many ESPs pay a lot of attention to complaints and will, in fact, initiate an investigation into a customer’s practice on a report from a trusted complainant.
There are a lot of legitimate email senders out there who value quantity over quality when it comes to complaints. But that doesn’t mean their lists are good or clean or they won’t see delivery problems or SBL listings at some point.

What's the best ESP?

I often get clients and potential clients asking me to tell them what the absolute best ESP is.
“You’re an expert in the field, which ESP will give me the best inbox delivery?”
The thing is, there isn’t an answer to that question.
ESPs have expertise in sending large amounts of mail. All have staff that manage and monitor MTAs. Most have staff that provide advice on delivery issues. Many have staff that handle abuse complaints, FBLs and blocks.
What they don’t have is magic delivery fairies or bat phones into postmaster desks.
Simply moving mail to an ESP won’t give you delivery. For the most part, delivery is the responsibility of the sender, whether they send mail through an in house system or through an ESP.
Delivery is primarily about how recipients react to a particular mail stream. Send mail recipients want, interact with and relate to and you usually see good delivery. The IP addresses or infrastructure contribute but do not dominate the equation. Sending from an ESP won’t fix poor content, irrelevant mail or unengaged recipients.
I can hear everyone now shouting at their screen “What about shared IPs!!!?!?!” Yes, yes, if you use an ESP with shared IP addresses and the ESP gets a bad customer you may see poor delivery for a time because one of their other customers was bad. It’s a fact, it happens. Plus, if you use an ESP with dedicated IPs and the ESP gets a bad customer you may see poor delivery for a time because one of the other customers was bad and their IP is near yours.
So clearly the answer is to bring email in house. That way no other company can affect your delivery, right? Yes. Kinda.
Are you willing to invest money in hiring email and DNS savvy sysadmins? Invest money in a MTA designed to handle bulk mail? Invest in an expert who not only understands bounce handling, but can explain to your developers what a good bounce handling system must do? Invest in someone who can manage authentication like DKIM? Who can handle delivery issues and understands how to talk to ISPs? Invest in development to write a FBL processor?
For some companies, the internal investment is the right answer, and bringing mail in house makes business sense.
For a lot of companies, though, they just want to use email to communicate with customers. They don’t want to have to invest in multiple staff members (as it’s very rare to find a single person with all the various skill sets needed) to just send a weekly newsletter, or daily sales email. They need a tool that works, they don’t need to know how to sign up for a FBL, they don’t need to know how to handle bounces. They can outsource that work and focus on the communication value.
Finding the best ESP starts with finding out how you want to use email.
Question 1: What role does email play in my business?

New FBLs

There are two new FBLs in production. Synacor and Fastmail.fm. I’ll be updating the Wiki and FBL page today.

Be on the lookout

I’m hearing more rumors of ESPs seeing customer accounts being compromised, similar to what happened with The Children’s Place.

I don't have a "this is spam" button

Here at Word to the Wise we have some unique requirements for mail. For instance, I need to be able to receive examples of emails that are being blocked elsewhere in order to do my job. This means not only do we not outsource mail to someone else, we also run limited spam filtering on the server side. It does mean I have to wade through a bit more spam than others do, but that’s generally not a problem. My client side filters do a decent job at keeping most of the crud out of my mailboxes.
My work account gets very little spam in the folder I use as my inbox. I’m not even sure exactly why this is, but it’s true. One of the exceptions is a psychic (no, really) who has a copy of one of my work email addresses and she regularly spams me offering her spiritual guidance and the opportunity to buy her stuff in order to make peace within my world. I’ve received these before, usually I just delete them and move on.
Occasionally, though, I long for the ease of a “this is spam” button. Just to be able to hit a single button, no work, no effort and know that I have registered my frustration with a spammer. Today was one of those days. I really don’t want this psychic spam in my mailbox. It seems reasonably professionally done, though, so I check the headers to see if it’s being send from any ESP I know and if it’s worth my time to send in a “hey, didn’t sign up for this, and no, I didn’t forget, either” email.
I visited the website belonging to the domain sending the mail.