Email Deliverability Conversations

New Zealand has had enough of businesses and individuals not paying attention to their anti-spam laws.  They had been going with educational efforts, but they're fed up now.  Fines for spamming, either via email or SMS, are $200,000 for an individual or $500,000 for a business.

If you're a New Zealand resident and you're getting spam, you can file a complaint with the Department of Internal Affairs.

If you're sending to New Zealand residents, make sure you're honoring unsubscribes or it can cost you up to a cool half-million.

Countries all over the world are fed up.  ET handles your unsubs for you, so if you're sending through us, no worries.  Just make sure that if you're a new customer you've imported your previously unsubscribed customers as unsubscribed or that you don't upload them as Active subscribers. 


 

Lycos is migrating their customers onto a new mail system.  This new system uses a different type of spam filtering than their old system.  It's an adaptive spam filter that will let their users be able to decide what is and is not spam, adjusting its settings for each individual user. 

What's an adaptive spam filter?  It's a bit like the spam filter used in Thunderbird or Mac OS X Mail.  Similar to Bayesian spam filters, they learn based on what each individual person's preferences are rather than on a group's determination (complaints and user engagement models).  Each time a person clicks on spam or not spam, the system learns a little more about what types of emails that subscriber thinks is spam and what is not.  It gets smarter about the next piece of email that comes in. 

So what's that mean in practical terms?


Subscribers Rule!

Many of you knew that AOL was going to be doing more layoffs.  Unfortunately, AOL's US Postmaster team was hit very hard this time.  Their frontline support will still be handling many of the cases, but there is only one non-programming individual handling escalations.  Please be patient if you are experiencing problems with AOL, as Anna will be working quite hard over the coming weeks to get to as many cases as she can.

Domain Name Service

Just a quick post today for more advanced senders.  When you're sending email, sometimes you need to understand things other than SMTP - Simple Mail Transport Protocol (what we use to send email).  There are a lot of other internet protocols involved in getting your email from one place to another.  DNS is one of them.  DNS is involved in EVERY online interaction.  It's very technical, can be difficult to understand and even harder to explain. 

When you're trying to understand or explain to someone about sender authentication (Sender ID, SPF, DomainKeys, DKIM), it can seem an impossible task.  I found DNS Oversimplified the other day.  It explains the basics without making it sound like rocket surgery.  If you're looking to understand a little more about how the internet works, I recommend taking a look.

I admit it.  I am, at heart, a gamer.  I always have been.  I always will be.  I got hit by the bug early in high school with AD&D and it hasn't left me since.

I am also opposed to spam, in its many forms.  Unfortunately, sometimes these two things intersect and one of the things has to give way.  I'm pretty sure you can figure out which one it is.  You may think I'm talking about Zynga, but I'm not.  Although their games have had to give way recently because of their practices.  I'm talking about another game. 

Guild Wars.  I bought Guild Wars back when it came out and have played it on and off over the years.  I even bought some expansions and was going to get GW2 for a Christmas present.  Every once in a while, they send me a newsletter, even though I unsubscribe every time.  I have now unsubscribed more than five times.  I send them a nice email each time, explaining why this is bad and a violation of CAN-SPAM.  I even get a personal response saying they won't do it again.  Then I get another just when I'm about to start hoping that it's ok to start supporting them again.  The most recent one was the day before I went Christmas shopping.

I am heartbroken.  I love my games.  Don't look at me like that!  There are worse vices that I could have, like underwater basket-weaving or tai chi skydiving.  Fortunately, there are a lot of other game companies that get it.  I'll give my money and time to them instead. 

Dearest mailer,

My fearless leader Phil Schott pointed me at this Ken Magill article today.  It's all about blame.  Who really is responsible when your email gets blocked?  We've been together for so long and there's so much that we could point to. 

I don't want to talk about blame.  I gave up blame for Lent one year and never picked it up again.  I replaced it with personal responsibility and owning my actions.  Since I can't own your actions, I can't own all the responsibility for your email getting blocked.  Blocking happens for a very select number of reasons.  I will own responsibility if your email getting blocked happens for one of the reasons that are in my control if you will own your part.

The things that I can do wrong that might lead to blocking include some technical things you shouldn't have to worry about like mail servers are otherwise behaving obnoxiously or outside of internet norms.

1. Too many concurrent (or simultaneous) connections.
2. Too many recipients sent per connection.
3. Too many connections per IP.
4. Too many connections timing out during the transaction.
5. Transactions are being retried too often.

This is the part that I, as your ESP, own.  I have control over this part.  I'm set up to act respectfully to the internet.  Otherwise, my business model wouldn't work.  I want things with us to work out.  If you have a problem with an individual domain, I can make changes for them, I promise!  I am set up to be as respectful of ISPs and the rest of the internet as I can possibly be.  I really want this email marketing thing between us to work!  This is a relationship, a true partnership and it takes both of us working at it to make it work right. 

I know it may sound like a lot, but the rest is up to you.  Your list quality, user engagement, not mailing to older segments, sending relevant content to the right segments, regular re-engagement campaigns, knowing when to let go of old addresses...  This is all up to you.  I’ll even talk to ISPs for you.  You just need to tell me honestly what you're doing and work with me as a team.  I rely on you, my dearest mailer, to also act respectfully or all the work done on my side will make no difference for when it comes to your deliverability.

I really am doing my best to do my part.  Some of these things change and there are so many moving parts to keep up with.  There are things like sender authentication, too, that I have to know.   Laws change all the time and I have to keep up with all of those to give good guidance.  Will you work on keeping your list segmented and fresh?  Will you make sure you have true permission to send to your recipients and that you’re sending relevant content?  Do you send out regular re-engagement campaigns to people who haven't responded to you in the last six months to a year?  Are you willing say goodbye when a recipient hasn’t opened or clicked in the last year to eighteen months?  That’s what we both need to make this work between us and with the ISPs.

                                                           Yours always,
                                                           ExactTarget Deliverability

Do you ever feel like you're outside in the cold, looking in on someone else's wonderful celebration?  Is that what you felt like this weekend, when you looked at your Yahoo test box and saw other people's emails being delivered yet yours were delayed?  It's not fair!  You send good email.  You get low complaints.  Your users are engaged.  This cannot be!

When I worked in network abuse, the department responsible for stopping spam coming out from ISPs, I hated this time of year.  You pretty well work from Thanksgiving straight through to New Year’s including weekends, along with the mail admins.  You do this so that people get the email they asked for and your mail servers don't turn into a burning pile of expensive slag.  We would rotate who worked with a laptop on one knee and the new nephew on the other each holiday.  It's not much fun and it's not very rewarding.

ISPs’ mail servers are SWAMPED on Thanksgiving weekend, close to Christmas, and immediately following Christmas.  Everyone is sending right now.  First priority is personal, meaningful email.  One-to-one family and friend emails.  Second is small mailings, usually To: a small list of people with a small list of Cc:s and a lot of traffic back and forth.  After that is lower-volume regular mailing lists.  Then comes highly engaged mailing lists (think hobby lists).  Then marketing lists, trying to prioritize in order of how engaged their subscribers are.  Scattered in all of that is trying to block a lot of spam and fighting off random Denial of Service attacks. 

Everyone sends more email during the holidays, including individuals.  That puts a horrible strain on the ISPs’ mail servers.  It’s not that Yahoo and Hotmail and AOL don't want your recipients to get your marketing emails.  It’s that their users have made it clear that their first priority right now is finding out whether or not they’re going to get to see their new niece or whether they have to wait until Christmas.  After that, they’ll find out what you have in mind for savings. 

Highest priority is given to email being sent from other ISPs’ outbound mail servers.  Sometimes during the holidays, complaints rarely come into play with priority.  If there’s not enough MTA sockets (the number of slots that you have for inbound connections) or bandwidth for the other ISPs’ outbound servers (personal email), then ESP customers, business emails, etc, have their connections deferred.  It’s much more important to Jane and Joe User to find out what time everyone is meeting at Grandma’s house and who is bringing the pie than it is to find out which items are on sale at which store.

Mail servers will continue to try to deliver email for up to three days, so anything that got deferred on Thursday will keep pounding on Yahoo until Saturday.  Spammers spike their volume Wednesday around midnight because all the abuse admins are away for their family gatherings.   Some offers go out Thursday, but the main bulk of them hit Friday.  Mailers keep on trying to send or resend because their email hasn’t been delivered yet, which causes more problems.  Then you have Cyber Monday and more mail on already overloaded servers.  It will be Thursday before some customers see their mail bounce and much of it will be mail that would normally be delivered. 

Don't take it personally.  Mail servers are at capacity right now.  Annalivia Ford who wrote that fantastic poem from last week, Laura Atkins from Word to the Wise, and Mickey Chandler who is the go-to for all things related to spam law all talk more about this on their own blogs. 

It's truly not that ISPs don't want to accept your email.  They have limited resources and they're doing everything they can to get as much wanted email to their users as the can.  Their mail servers are like the roads on the holidays.  Plan ahead and expect delays.

My dear friend Annalivia, who has been a postmaster at AOL for many years, has a muse that rarely gets out in her day-to-day work.  When I mentioned my pre-Christmas posts, she jumped at the chance to add something poetic.  I admit our pre-Christmas workload increases quite a bit and I have not been as good about posting as I should have been.  You can thank Anna for getting me motivated again.

Cox made some changes to their mail servers this morning, leading to some accidental blocks this morning that we understand were not actually listed on the dnsbl referenced.  Other sources have confirmed that these blocks were wide-spread and accidental. 

Cox seems to have this resolved now and our tests show that previously blocked emails are now being delivered.   They responded to earlier cases and asked that customers who had email blocked this morning to try resending their blocked messages.

On Thursday, October 29th, Cox Communications make a number of changes and improvements to their spam filters. They added a special Postmaster
page:

http://postmaster.cox.net

And they added the invaluement.com DNSBLs to the blacklists they use to eliminate spam.

Unfortunately, during the early morning hours after this was implemented, there was a glitch in their system which caused some legitimate e-mail sent to cox.net addresses to mistakenly get blocked, and this was mistakenly attributed to the invaluement lists. (The invaluement.com lists did NOT have those legitimate sending IP addresses
blacklisted.) This glitch occurred between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. EST on 10/29/2009. The damage was greatly minimized by the off-hours timing of the incident and greatly minimized by Cox's internal whitelist.
The glitch is now completely fixed.
 

When my nephew was much younger, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas together on VHS until the tape broke.  He even thought his name was Jack the Pumpkin King!  The soundtrack will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life. 

Not only is this one of the best movies of all time, but it's a wonderful commentary on the state of email marketing during the holiday season.  I don't just mean that trying to get email delivered is a nightmare starting around Halloween or that marketers find themselves in somewhat different situations than they're used to during the rest of the year.  The flow of the movie and the soundtrack fit with how email marketing happens during the holiday season.  It happens every year. 

There's a dramatic uptick in all email marketing, be it legitimate email marketing or spam, that starts when the weather gets cold.  Some years, it triples or quadruples normal email volume.  And that means slower mail servers, more filters, more complaints, and slower response times.  It also means overworked, cranky mail and abuse admins.  I know.  I've been one of those cranky abuse admins.

The rules surrounding email deliverability, which are confusing enough, get more complicated during this time of year.  It feels like every company you have ever driven past and every partner of theirs is vying for your attention.  There are a lot of little things that you can do, from holiday ramp-up strategies to promoting special holiday-only marketing campaigns that draw customers in.


I'll leave you for now with this very important thought.

Engagement is more important than ever.  If you don't get the attention of your recipients, you'll find your email in the spam folder or blocked during your most crucial sales period.

As I've been writing this, the song "Making Christmas" has been running through my head.  It makes me want to ask which mindset do you have for your email campaigns, going into this holiday season?

"Snakes and mice get wrapped up so nice with spider legs and pretty bows. 
It's ours this time."
(Your focus is on your ideas of what your recipients should want.  You reach years back into your subscriber database.  You send out email to people who didn't give you permission.)

Or
"This thing will never make a present.  It's been dead now for much too long.
Try something fresher, something pleasant."
(Your focus is on what your customers are really interested in.  You're interested in actively engaged subscribers rather than the number of subscribers on your list.  You use dynamic content to create a one-to-one experience for your customers.)
 

Gmail and MSN Hotmail have recently started offering an unsubscribe link instead of a report spam button for some permission-based mailing lists, using the hidden X-List-Unsubscribe header that many email marketers and ESPs include in their emails.  It makes sense, as many people use the This is Spam button instead of unsubscribing from opt-in email. 

A customer asked us for some solid numbers on their unsubscribes, as they're trying to make some internal decisions on how to handle their unsubscribe process.  I knew the number of subscribers who click on the spam button was significant, but the numbers were eye-opening.  I looked at data for almost 80,000,000 emails sent (Yes, 80 MILLION emails), with complaint rates that never came near where an ISP would block and bounce rates that would make you drool. 

17% of unsubscribes came from customers who hit reply and asked to be removed.
43% of unsubscribes came from customers who followed the unsubscribe link in the email.
40% of unsubscribes came from customers who clicked the This is Spam button.

That's right.  40% of legitimate unsubscribes came through the feedback loop as a complaint.  ISPs take this figure into account, but it should give you something to think about next time you look to expand your email campaign. 

Even though they recognized the brand.

Even though they signed up for the email.

Even though they recently purchased from the company.

Even though many of them will continue to purchase services from this company.

On a list with engaged and active subscribers, 40% of the subscribers who no longer wanted to receive promotional materials that they had signed up for used the spam button instead of the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

Al Iverson and I spend a lot of time talking about user engagement.  It's been around for a very long time, but it's now a standard for inbox delivery.  How do you define engagement?  Quality over quantity.  Targeted email marketing.  True one to one communication.  But what does it really mean to you?  How does it make for a more effective email marketing campaign?  If permission is king, engagement is emperor.

How do you create an effective marketing campaign that keeps your customers coming  back in the age of DVRs, satellite radio, and short attention spans?  How do you get your customers to pay attention?  This is vital now for inbox delivery.  Yahoo has started measuring whether or not your recipients are spending time reading your email, whether they're looking for you in the spam folder, how vital you are to their daily lives.

I found a gentleman today who gets what it means to really engage with your customers.  You can visit Bob Gilbreath over at Marketing with Meaning and download a chapter of his book, The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning.

He gets it.  This concept of engagement, and he calls it meaning.  Marketing now, whether it is effective offline or effective email marketing, can no longer be interruptive to your customers' lives.  Your communications with them need to be not only permission-based but need to add some value to their daily lives. 

When you create email campaigns, what do you do to add value?  How do your targeted email marketing campaigns add to your recipients daily lives?  What do you put in your marketing campaign or to your email newsletter that drives your recipients to want to spend time with your company?

Click tracking.  We all do it.  It's a best email practice.  We all want to see who is following our links, what draws our subscribers in.  Was this targeted email marketing campaign effective?  What was the most interesting part of the email?  Where are my readers engaged?  Was this email campaign better targeted than last week's? 

But how you do it makes a huge difference with spam and virus filters.  What do I mean?  I'll tell you a secret.  Phishers and spammers like to use IP addresses and URIs of popular websites in the text of their emails and then put in HTML that makes it look like the recipient is clicking on http://www.bank.com.  But you don't do that, right?  What you might do is use http://www.partnercompany.com or even http://www.yourbusinesssite.com in the email that you're sending out through your favorite ESP, ExactTarget.

That's a no-no.  Definitely not an email deliverability best practice.  Why not?  Because you want us to track email clicks in those targeted emails.  You have a domain set aside just for us and that's the domain that we use for your email campaigns.  Your subscribers see http://www.yourbusinesssite.com, but they click on a link to http://email-yourbusinesssite.com. 

And that, my friends, looks like you're trying to be tricksy.
"So what do we do, email guru?" you cry in despair.  Let me give you a little email design tip that will make a huge difference with filters like Postini and MessageLabs (both of which are used frequently in B2B email), or email providers like Gmail and Hotmail. 

Use your words.  Wow your targeted opt-in audience with your awesome descriptive powers.