Testing
SPF ?all
The most read post on the blog is Authenticating with SPF: -all or ~all. In fact, it’s in the top 5 posts every single day. We still get comments on it, too. Usually from folks who disagree with my recommendations.
I still stand by my recommendations, though. It doesn’t really matter if you choose ~all or -all in your SPF records. Why? No major provider is rejecting mail solely because of a SPF fail. They may bulk the mail, but they won’t reject it. That’s why, in a deliverability context, it doesn’t matter which one you choose.
My one rule for SPF is never use ?all. Just. No. In the spec, ?all is “testing” mode. But it really is a signifier that the person who put the SPF record together doesn’t know what they’re doing. Unless they really are testing, but even then you shouldn’t see ?all on records for weeks or months.
~ or – never ?
Continuous Testing
HubSpot recently posted an blog article comparing which was better for engagement, plain text emails or HTML emails. In a survey they sent out in 2014, 64% of the responses said they preferred the HTML and image-based emails. It seems pretty straight forward, recipients say they want HTML emails over text based emails but through their A/B testing, the text versions had a higher open rate.
They also reported:
Deliverability of Facebook.com email addresses
Christopher Penn at What Counts did some testing to see what delivery to Facebook.com addresses looks like. It looks pretty grim.
Engagement based delivery makes testing tricky
Yesterday I wrote about how important recipients are to achieving good delivery. The short version of yesterday’s post is that delivery is all about engagement, and how the ISPs were really focusing on engagement and proving custom user experiences.
This is great, for the user. Take the common example where a commercial list has some highly engaged recipients and a bunch of recipients that can take or leave the mail. The ISP delivers the newsletter into the inbox of the highly engaged recipients and leaves it in the bulk folder of less engaged recipients.
With user focused delivery people get the mail they are interested in where they can read it and interact it. People who have demonstrated a lack of interest for a topic or a sender don’t see that mail.
This can get complicated for those of us trying to troubleshoot deliver problems, though. I have a couple mail accounts I use for testing at various ISPs. Even though I do very little to try and personalize the account I am seeing behaviour that leads me to wonder if ISP personalizing the inbox experience is going to make it that much more difficult to troubleshoot delivery issues.
I have to wonder, too, where this leaves delivery monitoring services in the future. If delivery is personalized, how can you know that the delivery monitoring addresses are representative any longer? Is there even a “representative” mailbox any longer?
Getting it so wrong
One of the things I notice is when vendors send me badly formatted emails. There’s one vendor of ours that gets it so wrong I find it offensive to receive their mails. Not only have they not managed to invoice or process payments correctly for months, but their billing emails come to me with one of the ugliest From: lines I’ve ever seen.
Now, I’ve seen Dave Crocker’s lectures on email address. I believe that technically this is a legal From: address. But, seriously? I’m amazed they ever get mail delivered.
“COMPANY <Firstname.Lastname”@company.com
Yes, I changed the name to protect the stupid.
I tried to reply to the email address and my mail client tells me “this does not appear to be a valid email address.” Well, no. No it doesn’t. But let’s try anyway.
And there’s the bounce. “Invalid address!!!”.
This vendor is sending out invoices with totally broken From: address. I wonder how many of their customers are not getting an actual invoice from them?
But, being the helpful person I am, I actually mailed the person and pointed out that their From: address was horribly broken and may be negatively impacting their delivery. I’m not expecting an answer, but at least I have done my good deed for the day.
As part of the deployment process of any new email system you should check to make sure the address is correct and people can reply to it. That single test “reply to mail” would have identified this problem 5 months ago and not taken one of their recipients to point it out to them.