ISP

Cyber Monday volumes

Wow! Congrats to all the senders out there for sending So Much Volume that mail servers are full. I’ve even seen reports that STARTTLS connections are taking multiple seconds to establish at Gmail. The volume of mail that it takes to make Google slow down is impressive.

Of course, Gmail isn’t the only system exhibiting slow downs. Other major consumer webmail providers are also showing signs their servers are under heavy load. I’m seeing reports about both AOL and Microsoft accepting mail slowly. Oddly enough, I’ve not seen anything about Yahoo having issues. Maybe folks just never use yahoo.com addresses any more.
There may not be a fix for this. It is very possible receiving systems just do not have the capacity to handle the volume of mail folks want to send today. If senders have, collectively, decided to send more mail than max capacity there isn’t much that can be done. Maybe some very forward thinking ISPs have spare servers they can deploy, but it’s unlikely.
No major advice here, just a warning that receivers may not be able to access all the mail that’s currently being shoved at them. Nothing to do except retry, and perhaps hold off some “less urgent” sends until after normal business hours. Those of you who are sending Cyber Monday sales emails may just have to extend them to Tuesday in some cases.
EDIT: After I posted this, I saw problems with Yahoo (mail accepted but not making it to the inbox) and Earthlink as well.

Back from MAAWG

Had an all too short trip to M³AAWG. It was great to see old friends and meet new folks. I have lots to talk about and a poll to get into the field once I get caught up on client work.

While I’m deep in the depths of my inbox, I thought I’d share a bit of insight into the question of new domain vs. subdomain that often comes up.

iOS List Unsubscribe Functionality

Al did a great post over on Spamresource about the how the new list unsubscribe function in the default mail client from iOS10. What’s been interesting to me is how much I’m hearing from ESP folks about how their customers want it gone.
If you don’t know what we’re talking about, in the default mail client on iOS10, Apple is now offering a way to unsubscribe from list mail by placing an unsubscribe link at the top of the message.

As you can see, this isn’t just for commercial mail, it’s in place for every mailing list that has a List-Unsubscribe header. (This is a screenshot from something I posted to OI this morning). For me, it’s somewhat intrusive. I’m on a lot of discussion lists – technical, marketing, business and even a couple social ones. Reading them on my phone has become a challenge, as every email in a thread contains the “unsubscribe” button now.
Luckily, you can dismiss the message for all posts to that mailing list by hitting the ⮾⮾⮾⮾x. Interestingly, once you’ve turned it off there seems to be no way to turn it back on for that list.
Senders have different complaints, however, they do not have to do with intrusiveness or usability issues.
I’ve heard complaints about placement and about how easy it makes it to unsubscribe. One person even stated that everyone knows the place for an unsubscribe is at the bottom of a message and it should never be at the top of a message. I find these arguments unpersuasive. Unsubscribing should be easy. Unsubscribing should be trivial. People should be able to stop getting mail on a whim. Particularly here in the US, where unsolicited mail is legal, being able to quickly opt-out is the only thing keeping some of our mailboxes useful.
I’ve also heard some concerns that are a little more understandable. One company was concerned that unsubscribes go directly to their ESP rather than directly to them. This is a somewhat more understandable concern. Good senders use unsubscribes as part of their KPIs and as part of their campaign metrics. They know how much an unsubscribe costs them and will use that as part of their metrics for defining a successful campaign. Still, though, it’s not that big a concern. ESPs are already handling these kinds of unsubscribes from providers like gmail and hotmail.
Almost 7 years ago I blogged about a sender who wanted an unsubscribe link in the email client. It was a bit of snark on my part. The interesting part, though, is that some senders want unsubscribe mediated in the client and others things it’s horrible. I think this tells me that there’s no universal right answer. It Depends might be the most hated statement in deliverability, but it is the absolutely the reality of the situation.

Yes, Virginia, there is list churn

Yesterday I talked about how data collection, management, and maintenance play a crucial role in deliverability. I mentioned, briefly, the idea that bad data can accumulate on a list that isn’t well managed. Today I’d like to dig into that a little more and talk about the non-permanence of email addresses.
A common statistic used to describe list churn is that 30% of addresses become invalid in a year. This was research done by Return Path back in the early 2000’s. The actual research report is hard to find, but I found a couple articles and press releases discussing the info.

ISP filters are good for marketers

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 attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes available for marketing in a TV or radio hour and they cost real dollars. There’s only so much page space available for press. Billboards cost real money and you can’t just put a billboard up anywhere. With email marketing, there are no such costs and thus a recipient can be trivially and easily overwhelmed by marketers trying to grab their attention.
Whether its unsolicited email or just sending overly frequent solicited email, an overly full mailbox overwhelms the recipient. When this happens, they’ll start blocking mail, or hitting “this is spam” or just abandoning that email address. Faced with an overflowing inbox recipients may take drastic action in order to focus on the stuff that is really important to them.
This is a reality that many marketers don’t get. They think that they can assume that if a person purchases from their company that person wants communication from that company.

ISP relations in a nutshell

Senders: You’re blocking our mail, why?
Receivers: Because you’re spamming, stop spamming and we won’t block you.
Senders: But we’re not spamming. What do you mean we’re spamming! How could we be spamming, we’re not sending spam!
Receivers: You’re doing all these things (generating complaints, sending to dead accounts, hitting spam traps, not bounce handling, etc) that makes your mail indistinguishable from spam.
Senders: But we can’t tell what we’re doing wrong unless you give us more data!
Receivers: OK, fine. Here are FBLs, postmaster pages, sender access to support people. Now, stop spamming.
time passes
Receivers: It’s costing us how much to provide support to senders?!?! And after years of giving them lots of data it’s still the same problems over and over again? We’re not a charity, we’re going to control our costs and stop providing so much personal support.
And that, readers, is why receivers are pulling back from providing the data they used to.

Thoughts on "ISP relations"

I’ve been thinking a lot about the field of ISP relations and what it means and what it actually is. A few years ago the answer was pretty simple. ISP relations is about knowing the right people at ISPs in order to get blocks lifted.
The fact that ISPs had staff just to deal with senders was actually a side effect of their anti-spam efforts. In many places blocking was at least partially manual, so there had to be smart, technical, talented people to handle both the blocking and unblocking. That meant there were people to handle sender requests for unblocking.
Spam filters have gotten better and more sophisticated. Thus, the ISPs don’t need smart, technical, talented and expensive people in the loop. Most ISPs have greatly scaled back their postmaster desks and rely on software to handle much of the blocking.
Another issue is that some people on the sender side rely too heavily on the ISPs for their data. This makes the ISP reps, and even some spam filtering company reps, reluctant to provide to much help to senders. I’ve had at least 3 cases in the last 6 months where a sender contacted me to tell me they had spoken with someone at an ISP or filtering company and were told they would get no more help on a particular issue. In talking with those reps it was usually because they were drowning under sender requests and had to put some limits on senders.
All of this means ISP Relations is totally different today than it was 5 years ago. It’s no longer about knowing the exact right person to contact. Rather it’s about being able to identify problems without ISP help. Instead of being able to ask someone for information, ISP Relations specialists need to know how to find data from different sources and use that data to identify blocking problems. Sure, knowing the right person does help in some cases when there’s an obscure and unusual issue. But mostly it’s about putting together any available evidence and then creating a solution.
We still call it “ISP Relations” but at a lot of ISPs there is no one to contact these days. I think the term is a little misleading, but it seems to be what we’re stuck with.

ISP Relationships

Delivra has a new whitepaper written by Ken Magill talking about the value (or lack thereof) of relationships with ISPs. In Ken’s understated way, he calls baloney on ESPs that claim they have great delivery because they have good relationships with ISPs.
He’s right.
I get a lot of calls from potential clients and some calls from current clients asking me if I can contact an ISP on their behalf and “tell the ISP we’re really not a spammer”. My normal answer is that I can, but that there isn’t a place in the spam filtering process for “sender has hired Laura and she says they’re not a spammer.” I mean, it would be totally awesome if that was the case. But it’s not. It’s even the case where I’m close friends with folks inside the ISPs.
I’m pretty sure I’ve told the story before about being at a party with one of the Hotmail ISP folks. There was a sender that had hired me to deal with some Hotmail issues and I’d been working with Barry H. (name changed, and he’s not at Hotmail any more) to resolve it. During the course of the party, we started talking shop. Barry told me that he was sure that my client was sending opt-in mail, but that his users were not reacting well for it. He also told me there was no way he could override the filters because there wasn’t really a place for him to interfere in the filtering.
Even when folks inside the ISPs were willing and able to help me, they usually wouldn’t do so just because I asked. They might look at a sender on my request, but they wouldn’t adjust filters unless the sender met their standards.
These days? ISPs are cutting their non-income producing departments to the bone, and “sender services” is high up the list of departments to cut. Most of the folks I know have moved on from the ISP to the ESP side. Ken mentions one ISP rep that is now working for a sender. I actually know of 3, and those are just employees from the top few ISPs who are now at fairly major ESPs. I’m sure there are a lot more than that.
The reality is, you can have the best relationships in the world with ISPs, but that won’t get bad mail into the inbox. Filters don’t work that way anymore. That doesn’t mean relationships are useless, though. Having relationships at ISPs can get information that can shorten the process of fixing the issue. If an ISP says “you are blocked because you’re hitting spam traps” then we do data hygiene. If the ISP says “you’re sending mail linking to a blocked website” then we stop linking to that website.
I have a very minor quibble with one thing Ken said, though. He says “no one has a relationship with Spamhaus volunteer, they’re all anonymous.” This isn’t exactly true. Spamhaus volunteers do reveal themselves. Some of them go around openly at MAAWG with nametags and affiliations. A couple of them are colleagues from my early MAPS days. Other do keep their identities secret, but will reveal them to people they trust to keep those identities secret. Or who they think have already figured it out. There was one drunken evening at MAAWG where the nice gentleman I was joking with leaned over and says “You know I am elided from Spamhaus, right?” Uh. No? I didn’t. I do now!
But even though I have the semi-mythical personal relationship with folks from Spamhaus, it doesn’t mean my clients get preferential treatment. My clients get good advice, because I know what Spamhaus is looking for and can translate their requirements into solid action steps for the client to perform. But I can think of half a dozen ESP delivery folks that have the same sorts of relationships with Spamhaus volunteers.
Overall, relationships are valuable, but they are not sufficient to fix inbox delivery problems.

There is no bat phone

I don’t have much to add to Al’s post about the lack of people to call at different ISPs to get mail delivered. I will say there was a time some ISPs had staff that would deal with senders and blocking problems. But those positions have gradually been eliminated over the last 2 or 3 years. In some cases the employees left for greener pastures, in others they were subject to layoffs and budget cuts. In most cases, though, the employees were not replaced.
ISPs have moved to complex and multi-tired spam filtering. They’ve removed the ability of most employees to actually interrupt the filtering and special case a sender. Getting mail delivered is about sending mail that recipients want. It’s not about who you know. It’s about how much recipients like your mail.

Hunting the Human Representative

Yesterday’s post was inspired by a number of questions I’ve fielded recently from people in the email industry. Some were clients, some were colleagues on mailing lists, but in most cases they’d found a delivery issue that they couldn’t solve and were looking for the elusive Human Representative of an ISP.
There was a time when having a contact inside an ISP was almost required to have good delivery. ISPs didn’t have very transparent systems and SMTP rejection messages weren’t very helpful to a sender. Only a very few ISPs even had postmaster pages, and the information there wasn’t always helpful.
More recently that’s changed. It’s no longer required to have a good relationship at the ISPs to get inbox delivery. I can point to a number of reasons this is the case.
ISPs have figured out that providing postmaster pages and more information in rejection messages lowers the cost of dealing with senders. As the economy has struggled ISPs have had to cut back on staff, much like every other business out there. Supporting senders turned into a money and personnel sink that they just couldn’t afford any longer.
Another big issue is the improvement in filters and processing power. Filters that relied on IP addresses and IP reputation did so for mostly technical reasons. IP addresses are the one thing that spammers couldn’t forge (mostly) and checking them could be done quickly so as not to bottleneck mail delivery. But modern fast processors allow more complex information analysis in short periods of time. Not only does this mean more granular filters, but filters can also be more dynamic. Filters block mail, but also self resolve in some set period of time. People don’t need to babysit the filters because if sender behaviour improves, then the filters automatically notice and fall off.
Then we have authentication and the protocols now being layered on top of that. This is a technology that is benefiting everyone, but has been strongly influenced by the ISPs and employees of the ISPs. This permits ISPs to filter on more than just IP reputation, but to include specific domain reputations as well.
Another factor in the removal of the human is that there are a lot of dishonest people out there. Some of those dishonest people send mail. Some of them even found contacts inside the ISPs. Yes, there are some bad people who lied and cheated their way into filtering exceptions. These people were bad enough and caused enough problems for the ISPs and the ISP employees who were lied to that systems started to have fewer and fewer places a human could override the automatic decisions.
All of this contributes to the fact that the Human Representative is becoming a more and more elusive target. In a way that’s good, though; it levels the playing field and doesn’t give con artists and scammers better access to the inbox than honest people. It means that smaller senders have a chance to get mail to the inbox, and it means that fewer people have to make judgement calls about the filters and what mail is worthy or not. All mail is subject to the same conditions.
The Human Representative is endangered. And I think this is a good thing for email.

Having the same conversation

This morning I was reading a blog post about the failure of the congressional super committee. The author commented

Mail that looks like spam

One thing I repeat over and over again is to not send mail that looks like spam. Over at the Mailchimp Blog they report some hard data on what looks like spam. The design is simple, they took examples of mail sent by their customers and forwarded them over to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project to be reviewed by humans.
In a number of cases they discovered that certain kinds of templates kept getting flagged as spam, even when Mailchimp was sure that the sender had permission and the recipients wanted the mail. They analyzed some of these false positives and identified some of the reasons that naive users may identify those particular emails as spam.
Ben concludes:

Optonline problems

I’m hearing from multiple sources that they’ve been having problems getting mail delivered to optonline.net, optonline.com and optimum.net all day. This appears to be affecting senders across the board, from ISPs to ESPs.
It looks like something is not working right over there, and hammering retries doesn’t seem to be helping. The best recommendation is for senders to back off overnight and test some sends tomorrow.

I'm on a blocklist! HELP!

Recently, an abuse desk rep asked what to do when customers were complaining about being assigned an IP address located on a blocklist. Because not every blocklist actually affects mail delivery it’s helpful to identify if the listing is causing a problem before diving in and trying to resolve the issue.

Why offer a feedback loop?

Someone asked yesterday

What business advantage is there to an ISP in offering a feedback loop? I’ve never really seen one.
Read More

Delivery resources

I’m working on a few projects designed to help provide mentoring for other delivery people and to bridge the communication gap between the various groups active in email. One of those projects is collecting, linking to, and publishing more delivery resources. Some will be linked to directly from the blog, others will be linked to from the wiki. While I’m reasonably familiar with what’s out there, it is impossible for me to know about all the useful resources available. So I ask you readers:

State of the Industry

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a series of posts on the blog from various authors who are active in the email space.
I posted A very young industry commenting on the lack of experience among email marketers. I think that some of the conflict between ISPs and ESPs and receivers and marketers can be traced back to this lack of longevity and experience. Often there is only a single delivery expert at a company. These people often have delivery responsibilities dropped on them without any real training or warning. They have to rely on outside resources to figure out how to do their job and often that means leaning on ISPs for training.
JD Falk described how many at ISPs feel about this in his post With great wisdom…

You must be present to win

Guest post by Phil Schott
I often have the pleasure of putting my four year-old son to bed at night and I’m usually exhausted afterward. It’s a never-ending string of questions and admonishments that goes something like this,
“Daddy, is it a stay-at-home day tomorrow?
“No, Joe, tomorrow is a go-to-school day, it’s Tuesday. Joe, stop talking and go to sleep and please stop picking your nose.”
“Daddy, how long until the Easter bunny comes?”
“A few weeks. Now, go to sleep and stop picking your nose, Josef.”
“Dude, what did I say about picking your nose?”
“Sorry daddy, I can’t help it. It’s my job.”
“Daddy, When’s it going to be my birthday?”
“Joe, you’re not going to live to see your birthday if you don’t stop picking your nose and go to sleep.”
Lather, rinse, repeat for about 10-30 minutes every night. Same questions, same answers, always picking his nose.
In retrospect it seems funny and maybe sweet, but it never does at the time and the thought of doing it all over again tomorrow night makes me want to run out screaming.
However, I realize that if not me, who? Who’s going to tell Joe to stop picking his nose? Who’s going to answer his questions? I have to. It’s my job. If I want to be his dad, that’s what I’ve got to do. If not, then I don’t get to be his dad, I don’t get to be part of his life, and I don’t get to be part of my family.
There are folks in our industry just like Joe and me–those who never seem to get it, those who ask questions over and over, and those who tire of answering the same questions.
I’d like to thank those who answer those questions over and over. Folks like Al Iverson, JD Falk, Mickey Chandler, Greg Kraios, Ken Magill, Laura Atkins, Steve Atkins, Karen Balle, Annalivia Ford, and many others who deserve to be on this list.
I’ve only been in deliverability for a few years and I’d be nowhere if these folks hadn’t answered my dumb questions, posted their thoughts, shared their knowledge, and told me to stop picking my nose on occasion.
It pains me though to read from time to time the ranting of those in our industry who want to decry the dumb marketer, give up, and take their ball home. It’s a shame, but that’s their right and their decision. However, they then don’t get to be part of the community. They lose the effectiveness to tell a dumb marketer to stop picking his nose. They become a washed-up, has been, curmudgeon with no voice. Like with my four year-old son, if I want to be a part of the deliverability community I’ve got to stick it out and deal with it. You have to be present to win.
In her post, A very young industry, Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise quotes ExactTarget’s Joel Book as stating that less than 20% of those in email marketing have more than two years experience. Yes, it’s an industry full of four year-olds. If you’re one of those in the know are you going to bemoan this fact that’s beyond your control or are you going to work to make the community you’ve helped build a better place? You absolutely can choose to move on. We will miss you and I wish you the best of luck. But either keep helping out as you’ve expertly done or get out of the way. Don’t take cheap shots at those trying to do the right thing and trying to do some good work.
For those of you tired of answering the same inane questions you’re fooling yourself if you think the folks who really need to hear your message are reading. They’re not. And they’re going to keep on asking their inane questions until somebody helps them out. I choose to help them out. I choose to be part of the community. I choose to be present.
A big part of the issue is how daunting it can be to ask for help without the risk of appearing the fool. There are far too many folks in this business of deliverability who are more interested in proving how smart they are and selectively sharing knowledge than they are in helping raise the overall level of consciousness and enlightenment.
If you want the idiots and fools to go away then help them become something more. Help them like no one helped you when you started out. With much effort, time, and frustration, I could pick through five years of your blog posts to find the one bit of information I need, or you could give me the URL to the post that will reveal all. I’m not asking you to spoon feed me, I’m just asking for a little help. There’s no books on this stuff and you can’t go to school to get your BA in deliverability. All we’ve got is each other.
Phil Schott has been handling delivery and compliance for a major ESP for the last 3 and a half years.

With great wisdom…

Guest Post by JD Falk
There was certainly some surprise in the room when I pointed out (yep, it was me) that Laura has been around since before there were ESPs. Part of it, I’m sure, was because Laura’s not particularly ancient — and part was because it’s a shock to realize that people sent and received email and everything was just fine long before the segment of the industry that you work in had even been imagined.
Since this was at MAAWG, there were quite a few people in the room who were involved before there were ESPs (I asked for a show of hands) — and it was interesting to see how many of them work for ESPs now. Commenting on Laura’s article “A very young industry,” Kent McGovern mentioned three — including Anne Mitchell, who made up the word “deliverability” not long after stepping down as the head lawyer for the first shared blacklist of email-sending IP addresses.
Just think about that. She was the head lawyer for the MAPS RBL before there was such a thing as deliverability. (I worked with her there; so did Laura.)
There are a lot of us who’ve been around that long, and most don’t work in the deliverability/marketing side of the industry. Nearly all of us have become cynical over the years; some were cynical to begin with. A few, sadly, have burned out entirely from the frustration of having the same arguments, same discussions, over and over and over.
I think some of the recent refrain calling for ESPs to pressure each other into better practices comes in part from that same frustration. Yes, bad practices are bad, but we’re also tired with teaching the same thing to people with the same title, and feeling like the message never gets through. Part of what we’re saying is “It’s your industry, you’ve learned this stuff, now you teach ’em.”
And when you do, it does work — far more often than when we say it, because you speak the same language. There’s now a generation (for lack of a better term) of ESP & deliverability staff who weren’t around before there were ESPs, maybe not even before CAN-SPAM, but have learned many of the same things and undergone similar transformation. Who’d have thought that Jaren Angerbauer — quite possibly the nicest guy in the industry — would ever start sighing at those young whippersnappers like a cynical old anti-spammer? And Jaren’s not only teaching deliverabilitators; he’s also teaching college students, ensuring that they’ll know far more when they enter the work force than you or he did.
We old-timers once struggled with the idea that we must reach out — even to people we disagree with — and teach what we knew, learning along the way to put it into terms that marketers understand. It’s so much simpler to add to a blacklist and throw away they key, declaring “not my problem anymore.” But we did start teaching, and look how far we’ve come; we’re still doing it, and look how much further there is to go.
Now it’s time for the next generation to do the same. Stop looking to us, or to the ISPs, to solve the problems of your industry for you; we’re busy dealing with spam, as we should’ve been doing all along. Your colleagues’ cluelessness is exactly as impermanent as your own was, and can be overcome in the same ways. Whether you have fifteen or ten or five or merely two years of experience, you’ve found your way to this blog and read down to this line, and attained some measure of wisdom, and you can ease the passage for others.
When someone at a marketing conference says something that you know isn’t true, that you know will result in poor deliverability and industry ire, call them on it. Engage them in a dialogue. Teach, explain, cajole, push — because with great wisdom comes great responsibility.
It’s your turn.
J.D. Falk is Director of Product Strategy for Receiver Products at Return Path, which is not an ESP.

A very young industry

Last week I saw a tweet that quoted Joel Book, Director of eMarketing Education at Exacttarget as saying

Delivery delays due to congestion

Now that we’re deep in the middle of the Christmas shopping season, I’m seeing more and more complaints about delays at ISPs. Mickey talked about everything the ISPs have to consider when making hardware and buildout decisions in his post The hard truth about email on Spamtacular. When, like on cyber Monday, there’s a sharp increase in the volume of email, sometimes ISPs don’t have the capacity to accept all the email that is thrown at them.

Legitimate email marketers need to take a stand

I was reading an article on Virus Rants and the opening paragraph really stood out.

The nightmare before Christmas

Over at the Exacttarget blog, there is a guest post up from Annalivia who handles much of the sender support (and about 15 million other things) at AOL.

They are all Barry. Listen to Barry

Al has a guest post up from an ISP rep (now universally referred to as Barry) about senders contacting ISPs. It lists things senders do that Barry Don’t Like.
Listen to Barry.
There are also comments from various other Barrys in the comments. Those are worth reading, too.

Delivery emergencies

There is no such thing as a delivery emergency. They just do not happen.
Delivery is fluid, delivery is changing, delivery is complex.
But when delivery goes bad it is not an emergency. There is no need to call up an ISP person at home on a Saturday afternoon and ask them to remove the filters. (And, BTW, experience indicates if you do this that you may have future delivery issues at that ISP.)
I’m sure that people will provide me with examples of delivery emergencies. And, in some cases I might even concede that the receivers will be happy to receive email immediately when it was sent. However, email as a protocol was designed for store and forward. It was not designed to transmit messages instantaneously from sender to receiver. Sure, it works that way much of the time these days. On the whole the Internet is fairly reliable and major servers are connected 24/7 (which wasn’t always the case).
Among many people, particularly recipients and ISP employees, there isn’t the expectation that bulk email is instantaneous. This leads to the belief that delivery problems are not an emergency. Everyone faces them, they get dealt with, life goes on. Demanding an escalation to deal with a “delivery emergency” may backfire and slow down how long it takes to get a response from an ISP.

Troubleshooting Yahoo delivery

Last week Jon left a comment on my post Following the Script. He gives a familiar story about how he’s having problems contacting Yahoo.

Reputation as measured by the ISPs

Part 3 in an ongoing series on campaign stats and measurements. In this installment, I will look a little closer at what other people are measuring about your email and how that affects your reputation at the ISPs.
Part 1: Campaign Stats and Measurements
Part 2: Measuring Open Rate
Reputation at the ISPs is an overall measure of how responsive recipients are to your email. ISPs also look at how much valid email you are sending. Anything the ISP can measure and use to distinguish good mail from bad is used in calculating reputation.
Some of the major metrics ISPs use include the following.
Invalid Address Rates
The ISPs count how much mail from any particular IP address is hitting non-existent addresses. If you are mailing a large number of email addresses that do not exist (550 user unknown), this is a suggestion that your address collection techniques are not very good. Responsible mailers do have the occasional bad address, including typos, expired/abandoned addresses, but the percentage in comparison to the number of real email addresses is low. How low is low? Public numbers suggest problems start at 10% user unknowns, but conversations with ISP employees show they consider lower levels a hint there may be a problem.
To calculate bounce rate ISPs take the total number of addresses that were for invalid accounts and divide that by the total number of addresses that the sender attempted to send mail to. Rates above 10% may cause significant delivery issues on their own, rates lower that 10% may still contribute to poor delivery through poor reputation scores.
Spamtraps
ISPs pay a lot of attention to how much mail is hitting their “trap” or “bait” accounts. There are a number of different sources of these trap accounts: old abandoned email addresses, addresses that never existed or even role accounts. Hits to a trap account tells the ISP there are addresses on your list that did not opt-in to receive mail. And if there are some addresses they know about that did not opt-in, it is likely that there are other addresses that did not opt in.
Spamtraps tend to be treated as an absolute number, not as a percentage of emails. Even a single spamtrap on a list can significantly harm delivery. According to the ReturnPath Benchmark report lists with a single spamtrap had nearly 20% worse delivery than lists without spamtraps.
This is spam clicks (FBL complaints)
Complaints from users are heavily used by ISPs. This tells them directly how many people are objecting to your email. In this case, permission is removed from the equation. Even if a sender has permission to send email, the recipient can say “no, I don’t want this, it is spam.” The ISPs put more weight on what their users tell them than on what the senders tell them.

Verizon does not have a FBL

When I posted my initial cut of the ISP information page earlier this year, there was a comment asking about a Verizon FBL. At that time, I talked to some of the people-who-would-know over at Verizon and asked if they do have a FBL. The answer was a definite no.
For some reason, though, I continue to receive questions about the Verizon FBL. Based on the questions, the best I can extrapolate is that there is an ESP out there, somewhere, that states they have a Verizon FBL. It is possible, albeit unlikely, that they have a special agreement with Verizon. However, there is no generally available Verizon FBL.
If Verizon does make a FBL widely available, I will mention it here and update the ISP information page with the data. Until then, be very cautious with claims that there is a Verizon FBL.

Following the script

Yesterday I talked about breaking through the script in order to escalate an issue. I briefly mentioned that I always start out following the script and using the channels ISPs have provided. There are a number of reasons to do this all of which benefit you, the sender.
First off, when you use the designated communication pathway at an ISP there is a record of your contact. There are procedures in place to make sure your communication is addressed and you get a response. When you’re escalating to an individual, you’re using their communication channel. IMs get lost, email ends up buried in the pile, other things come up and a week later you’re still waiting for your answer.
Secondly, when you use the designated communication pathway at an ISP your contact is logged and tracked. This means that if the person you’re used to dealing with gets another job, moves on or otherwise isn’t able to communicate with you any longer you have a history with that ISP. The next person to move into the position and deal with issues can see that you’re a legitimate sender with a history of dealing fairly and professionally with ISPs.
Thirdly, handling direct and personal escalations are often outside the official job description the people directly contacted. This means that when they come up for review, the work they’re doing for people who won’t use channels is not as important as the other work they do. Sure, they may get some credit for helping people with problems, but they may not get the review they should get. This hurts not just the senders who believe they shouldn’t have to follow channels but also those of us who do follow channels, particularly in the current business climate. Do you really want to lose that awesome person you use because some dork thought they were too good, too important to use the provided form and that awesome person lost their job because they didn’t meet their official work goals?
Fourth, you’re not the only one escalating. I had the opportunity to visit my friend Anna from AOL a few years ago. One morning both of us had to actually get some work done, so we were parked in her living room on laptops. I was astonished at the number of IM windows she was juggling constantly. We’re talking 20 – 30 separate windows open at once, many of them troubleshooting sender issues. After seeing that I do as much as possible through the official channels that AOL has provided. She is my friend, and a very good one, and I still avoid using her as a contact point unless there is some emergency.
Remember this next time you are searching for that email address of the person from that ISP that’s currently blocking your mail. Use the official communication channels where possible, and always use them first. Using back channels for issues where the intended workflow works causes a lot of overhead and doesn’t scale at all well.

RoadRunner FBL changes

RoadRunner announced changes to their FBL this morning. Everyone who is currently getting a FBL should have received an email. Important dates to remember include the following.
August 28: Existing RR FBL will be frozen. No changes to existing loops will be accepted and no new FBL applications will be processed. All current FBLs will continue to work.
November 17 (tentative): The new FBL will go live. Existing FBLs will not be converted from the old FBL to the new one. Everyone wishing to be a part of the new FBL will be required to re-enroll in the program beginning on this date.
December 31 (tentative): The old FBL ceases to exist.
More information about the migration is available at http://postmaster.rr.com/FBL.html

Sender complaints about spamfiltering

JD posed a question in my post about Postini and trying to sort out a customer getting marked as spam by their filtering mechanism and I think it bears more discussion than can be done in comments.

AOL Postmaster blog

AOL announced today they are launching a postmaster blog http://journals.aol.com/pmtjournal/blog/
I’ll be updating the blogroll, too. I’ve been checking out some new delivery / marketing blogs the last few weeks.

Report spam button broken: an ISP perspective

This press release has been discussed in a lot of groups and sites I read. One of my favorite comments comes from one of the filter developers at a large ISP. He was asked “does the overuse/misuse of the this-is-spam button significantly affect the ability to do your job?” His response, reposted with permission,

Yahoo, part 5…

… wherein I rename this blog “What change did Yahoo make today.” No, really, I like the guys at Yahoo a lot, but really, occasionally I would like to blog about something different!
Today’s change, actually yesterday’s, is that Yahoo has closed their beta FBL program to changes or additions. It is a beta program, this is not unexpected. They will be making changes based on the results of that program and will open it up sometime in the future.
Yahoo!’s announcement

Unauthenticated email

A few weeks ago, NetworkWorld posted an interview with Mark Risher of Yahoo. In it, Mark talked about how Yahoo had no plans to outright block or refuse any unauthenticated email. Of course authentication will be a large part of their decision making for incoming emails but they cannot just refuse to accept mail that is unauthenticated, because there are times when unauthenticated email is the most important mail to their recipients.
A lot of marketers often seem to forget that they are competing for time and space with other, non-marketing, types of email. Email from friends and family and discussion lists are both more important to most people that the latest and greatest email advertisement. These are the emails people want to receive, the ones they open, read and respond to.
In terms of authentication, right now the majority of wanted emails are unsigned with DK or DKIM. Sure there are the early adopters who are using DK/DKIM to sign their emails, and a few large ISPs have started signing outgoing email. But until the vast majority of wanted email is actually signed, recipient ISPs are going to have to accept unsigned email.
Looking forward, even if all of the ISPs sign email sent through their SMTP servers, there will still be some fraction of desired email that will be unsigned. Individuals and small businesses who choose to run their own mailservers may not sign email. Even though these servers make up a tiny fraction of total email, they make up a much larger fraction of wanted email. ISPs cannot block this email without angering their customer base.
Marketers should not be concerned about ISPs blocking unauthenticated email, as it is extremely unlikely that any major ISP will do that. Marketers should focus, instead on making their email relevant and wanted by the recipients. I have been recommending clients plan to have all their outgoing emails DK/DKIM signed by the end of 2008.

Yahoo delays, part 2

A number of people have posted to various mailing lists and made blog posts pointing to the Yahoo Mail blog post discussing recent problems Yahoo was having with mail. The general feeling seemed to be “AHA! That’s what is wrong!”
Unlike many of my peers, I do not think this explains the delivery problems senders have been seeing while attempting to deliver mail to Yahoo. The Yahoo mail blog article is talking about the Yahoo outgoing mailservers (smarthosts) for their non-webmail users. It is extremely unlikely that these are the same servers used for incoming email.
While I sympathize with everyone who had the AHA! moment and thought their delivery problems were being acknowledged and addressed by Yahoo! I do not think this is really what that blog post is saying.
I am hearing from people that Yahoo is aware of a problem with delayed incoming email, and they are working on fixing it. This does seem to be a broader problem than just bulk mailers, I am hearing from small and mid-size ISPs that they are having significant problems delivering email to Yahoo, too.
For more information about what Yahoo is doing to filter mail check out my previous post Greylisting: that which Yahoo! does not do.

Yahoo delays

You may have noticed increase in delays and rejections from Yahoo. I am certainly seeing a lot of customers complaining and hearing a lot of other delivery people commenting on problems getting mail into Yahoo. I have even heard from multiple ISPs that are struggling with full queues and delayed email.
No solutions or suggestions right now, just that everyone is having problems right now. I expect it will take some time for the backlogs to dissipate, even after the underlying problem is fixed. If I hear anything more I will post it here.

Articles I read today

It has been a rather busy day today, I do not have a full blog post. I did see a couple posts come across my RSS feeds. Both of them have content I want to talk about and discuss in a little more detail, as I think they touched on some very interesting issues.
Network World has an article interviewing Mark Risher from Yahoo. The article discusses Yahoo’s use of DomainKeys as part of their inbound mail filtering.
Mickey has an article about how to deal with ISPs when attempting to troubleshoot a blocking issue.
More details and commentary on both articles later this week.

ESP unwittingly used to send spam

Late last week I heard from someone at AOL they were seeing strange traffic from a major ESP, that looked like the ESP was an open relay. This morning I received an email from AOL detailing what happened as relayed by the ESP.

Updating SenderID records for Microsoft

In the past, bulk senders who wanted Microsoft to check SenderID had to email information to a special Microsoft address. Microsoft would then cache the senderID data from the sender’s DNS records and verify incoming email.
Microsoft has simplified the process and now has a webform to submit the data.
http://support.msn.com/…
In order to submit your information you will need a contact email address, the domains that you want to add and the SPF records of those domains.

Predictions for 2008

I did not have a lot of predictions for what will happen with email at the beginning of the year so I did not do a traditional beginning of the year post. Over the last 3 – 4 weeks, though, I have noticed some things that I think show where the industry is going.
Authentication. In January two announcements happened that lead me to believe most legitimate mail will be DK/DKIM signed by the end of the year. AOTA announced that approximately 50% of all email was currently authenticated. They did not separate out SPF/SenderID authentication from DK/DKIM authentication, but this still suggests email authentication is being widely adopted. AOL announced they will be checking DKIM on their inbound mail. I expect more and more email will be DKIM signed in response to this announcement.
Filtering. The end of 2007 marked a steady uptick in mail being filtered or blocked by recipient domains. I expect this trend to continue throughout 2008. Recipient domains are rolling out new technology to measure complaints, evaluate reputation and monitor unwanted email in ways that tease out the bad actors from the good. This means more bad and borderline email will be blocked. Over the short term, I expect to see more good email blocked, too, but expect this will resolve itself by Q2/Q3.
Sender Improvements. As the ISPs get better at filtering, I expect that many borderline senders will discover they cannot continue to have sloppy subscription practices and still get their mail delivered. Improved authentication and better filtering let ISPs pin-point blocks. Instead of having to block by IP or by domain, they can block only some mail from a domain, or only some mail from an IP. There are a number of senders who are sending mail that users do not want mixed with mail that recipients do want. Right now, if there is more mail that recipients want in that mix, then ISPs let the mail through. This will not continue to happen through 2008. Senders will need to send mail users actively want in order to see good delivery.
Less is more. A lot of other email bloggers have talked about this, and I will echo their predictions. Less email is more. Send relevant mail that your customers want. Target, target, target. Good mailers will not send offers to their entire database, instead they will send mail to a select portion of their database.
Feedback loops. Use of feedback loops by recipient domains will continue to grow.
Mobile email. More recipients will be receiving email on mobile devices.
Suggestions for 2008

Comcast rate limiting

Russell from Port25 posted a comment on my earlier post about changes at Comcast.

AOL checking DKIM

Sources tell me that AOL announced on yesterday’s ESPC call that they are now, and have been for about a week, checking DKIM inbound. This fits with a conversation I had with one of the AOL delivery team a month or so back where they were asking me about what senders would be most concerned about when / if AOL started using DKIM.
The other announcement is that AOL, like Yahoo, would like to know how you categorize your outgoing mail stream as part of the whitelisting process.
Both of these changes indicate to me that AOL will be improving the granularity of their filtering scheme. DKIM signing will let them separate out different domains and different reputations across a single sending IP address. The categorization will allow AOL to evaluate sender statistics within the context of the specific type of email. Transactional mail can have different statistics from newsletters from marketing mail. Better granularity means that poor senders will be less able to hide behind good senders. I expect to hear some wailing and gnashing of teeth about this change, but as time goes on senders will clean up their stats and their policies and, as a consequence will see their delivery improve everywhere, not just AOL.

Update on Yahoo and the PBL

Last week I requested details about Yahoo rejections for IPs pointing to the PBL when the IP was not on the PBL. A blog reader did provide me with extremely useful logs documenting the problem. Thank you!
Based on my examination of the logs, this appears to be a problem only on some of the Yahoo! MXs. In fact, in the logs I was sent, the email was rejected from 2 machines and then eventually accepted by a third.
I have forwarded those logs onto Yahoo who are looking into the issue. I have also talked with one of the Spamhaus volunteers and Spamhaus is aware of the issue as well.
The right people are looking at the issue and Spamhaus and Yahoo are both working on fixing this.
Thanks for the reports and for the logs.

AOL and AIM mail

Earlier this week a question came up on a mailing list. The questioner recently started seeing an increase in rejections to @aol.com addresses. These rejections said

PBL and Yahoo

A few days ago I posted about Yahoo using the Spamhaus lists. In the comments of that post there have been multiple reports of mail being bounced from Yahoo with a reason of “on the PBL” but the IP was not on the PBL.
I am happy to look into this for people. I’m sure neither Spamhaus nor Yahoo want to be incorrectly rejecting email. To do this, though, I need the rejection message from Yahoo, the IP the mail was sent from and when it happened. Feel free to email the information to laura at wordtothewise.com.

Changes at RoadRunner

I’ve been hearing rumors that some *.rr.com domains have been bouncing all mail sent to them. Those domains belong to customers that were moved to Comcast as part of the RoadRunner / Comcast / Adelphia purchase and customer swap. As a courtesy, RoadRunner forwarded mail to comcast for those former RoadRunner customers, but have ceased to do so.
Mail to any address in the following *.rr.com domains will no longer be delivered.
jam.rr.com
midsouth.rr.com
mn.rr.com
se.rr.com
sport.rr.com
swfla.rr.com
ucwphilly.rr.com
houston.rr.com
These addresses should be removed from your lists. These users now have Comcast addresses. You cannot just substitute the Comcast domain for the RoadRunner domain as users were required to choose new localparts. That means bobjones@houston.rr.com may not be, and probably is not, bobjones@comcast.

Yahoo and Spamhaus

Yahoo has updated and modified their postmaster pages. They have also put a lot of work into clarifying their response codes. The changes should help senders identify and troubleshoot problems without relying on individual help from Yahoo.
There is one major change that deserves its own discussion. Yahoo is now using the SBL, XBL and PBL to block connections from listed IP addresses. These are public blocklists run by Spamhaus. Each of them targets a different type of spam source.
The SBL is the blocklist that addresses fixed spam sources. To get listed on the SBL, a sender is sending email to people who have never requested it. Typically, this involves email sent to an address that has not opted in to the email. These addresses, known as spamtraps, are used as sentinel addresses. Any mail sent to them is, by definition, not opt-in. These addresses are never signed up to any email address lists by the person who owns the email address. Spamtraps can get onto a mailing list in a number of different ways, but none of them involve the owner of the address giving the sender permission to email them.
Additionally, the SBL will list spam gangs and spam supporters. Spam supporters include networks that provide services to spammers and do not take prompt action to remove the spammers from their services.
The XBL is a list of IP addresses which appear to be infected with trojans or spamware or can be used by hackers to send spam (open proxies or open relays). This list includes both the CBL and the NJABL open proxy list. The CBL list machines which appear to be infected with spamware or trojans. The CBL works passively, looking only at those machines which actively make connections to CBL detectors. NJABL lists machines that are open proxies and open relays.
The Policy Block List (PBL) is Spamhaus’ newest list. Spamhaus describes this list as

SenderScore update

Matt has posted a bit more about the SenderScore Blacklist, following up on my post about the changes at Comcast. George Bilbrey, VP and General Manager, for Return Path followed up with him to explain a bit more about the blacklist. George says:

Changes at Comcast

I can usually tell when one of the ISPs makes some change to their incoming spam filtering just by my call volume. The past few weeks the ISP in most of my calls has been Comcast. And, what do you know, they have made changes to how they are filtering email.
According to their bounce message, Comcast is using ReturnPath’s proprietary SenderScore product to filter mail. Reports on thresholds vary, but IPs with SenderScores of 70 and below have been blocked with messages similar to:

Best practices and ISPs

A couple articles came out today talking about ISP requirements and how to find them.
EmailInsider talks about ISP best practices and how merely complying with CAN-SPAM is not enough to get good delivery at the ISPs.
Meanwhile, over at ClickZ, Stefan talks about what the ISPs want from you and how to find the information online.

Greylisting: that which Yahoo does not do

Over the last couple days multiple people have asserted to me that Yahoo is greylisting mail. The fact that Yahoo itself asserts it is not using greylisting as a technique to control mail seems to have no effect on the number of people who believe that Yahoo is greylisting.
Deeply held beliefs by many senders aside, Yahoo is not greylisting. Yahoo is using temporary failures (4xx) as a way to defer and control mail coming into their servers and their users.
I think much of the problem is that the definition of greylisting is not well understood by the people using the term. Greylisting generally refers to a process of refusing email with a 4xx response the first time delivery is attempted and accepting the email at the second delivery attempt. There are a number of ways to greylist, per message, per IP or per from address. The defining feature of greylisting is that the receiving MTA keeps track of the messages (IP or addresss) that it has rejected and allows the mail through the second time the mail is sent.
This technique for handling email is a direct response to some spamming software, particularly software that uses infected Windows machines to send email. The spam software will drop any email in response to a 4xx or 5xx response. Well designed software will retry any email receiving a 4xx response. By rejecting anything on the first attempt with a 4xx, the receiving ISPs can trivially block mail from spambots.
Where does this fit in with what Yahoo is doing? Yahoo is not keeping track of the mail it rejects and is not reliably allowing email through on the second attempt. There are a couple reasons why Yahoo is deferring mail.

ISP Postmaster sites

A number of ISPs have email information and postmaster sites available. I found myself compiling a list of them for a client today and thought that I would put up a list here.

Changes at AOL Postmaster desk

The recent layoffs at AOL did affect the AOL Postmaster desk, and information I have received is that there was significant loss. As a result of the staff decrease, some changes have been made to the whitelisting and FBL processes. In order for a FBL to be approved it must meet the new FBL guidelines. In a nutshell, anyone wanting to get a FBL from AOL must meet ONE of the following criteria.

More on Truthout

Ken Magill comments on the reaction of truthout.org to being blocked by AOL and Hotmail.
I do agree with Al, if both AOL and Hotmail are blocking your email, then you’re doing something wrong.

They’re not blocking you because they hate you.

Really. They’re blocking you because you’re doing something that is triggering their blocking mechanisms.
This has happened over and over and over again. Some political or activist website sends out an email that gets blocked by some large ISP and the political site turns it into a giant crisis that means the ISP hates them or is trying to shut them up or is trying to silence their message.
Except that’s not what is going on. The folks at the large ISPs who handle blocking and incoming mail are incredibly smart and conscientious . They take their jobs seriously. They, both personally and corporately, want their customers (the end recipients) to receive the email they want. Additionally, they do not want to deliver mail that the recipients did not ask to receive.
In almost no cases is the block a particular activist site encounters a result of the ISP not liking the content of the email. If an activist site is being blocked it’s due to complaints or reputation or something that ISPs measure and block on. Some person at the ISP didn’t read your email, decide they didn’t like what you had to say and then block that email. That email was blocked because something related to that email triggered the thresholds for blocking.
Of course, as with everything online, there are caveats. In this case it’s that the above statements really only hold true for large ISPs in free countries. There are some countries in the world that do block email based on content, and that is dictated by the government. Likewise, some small ISPs will block based on the guy in charge not liking the email.
Generally, though, if an activist site is being blocked by a large ISP in the US or other free countries it is because their mailings are somehow not complying with that ISPs standards. Instead of starting an email campaign or blog campaign to shame the ISP for suppressing speech, it is much more productive to actually contact the ISP in question and find out what went wrong.