Receivers

Reputation is in the eye of the beholder

A few years ago reputation was generally recognised as one thing. If a sending reputation or IP reputation was good in one place it was likely good in other places. Different entities mostly reputation using the same set of signals albeit slightly tweaked to meet their own needs. More recently there is a divergence in how reputation is measured, meaning delivery can be vastly different across entities.

The long tail of domains

I frequently get clients telling me that they have about 15 (20, 30) major domains on their list, and then a long tail of domains with only a couple of recipients. If you sort simply by the left hand side of the @, that’s true.
When you’re sending email, it’s not just the domain in the email address that is important. Of equal importance is the MX. The MX is what actually handles the mail and where many filters are applied. Sorting by MX, instead of simply recipient domain, can identify that most of your small business clients are hosted at a particular provider. The number of subscribers behind that filter may be enough to push that filter into your top 10 or even top 5 recipient domains.
There’s a much smaller tail when grouping recipients by MX domain. It makes it much easier to understand where blocks are happening. I have even seen cases where clients didn’t realize they were blocked at a commercial provider because they only saw the “onesie twosie” domains as undeliverable. They missed a real problem with blocking because they were looking at the wrong data.
I sometimes get the side eye from some ISP folks if I use the term receiver (because, well, they’re senders as much as they are receivers). But I use receiver to help distinguish between the recipient domain and the actual domain handling the email.
When was the last time you looked at your delivery by filter or MX rather than by recipient domain? What did you find?

Delivery implications of Yahoo releasing usernames

Yahoo announced a few weeks ago it would be releasing account names back into the general pool. This, understandably, caused a lot of concern among marketers about how this would affect email delivery at Yahoo. I had the opportunity to talk with a Yahoo employee last week, and ask some questions about how this might affect delivery.
Q: How many email addresses are affected?