One of the things that leaped out at me during that post is that the positive emails highlight how much the Mailchimp delivery and compliance people help their users get good delivery. They’re not just saying “you can’t do that” because they’re mean or they want to make life more difficult for their users. They are saying no because what the user wants to do is a bad idea.

I also appreciated the letter from the customer who had to tell Mailchimp that management had decided to not take Mailchimp’s advice. This is something that happens to me sometimes. Clients agree with my recommendations but management decides that they’re not going to implement them. It can be difficult to watch, particularly when I then see how much that company is struggling with blocks or see them show up on some of the big spam lists. But, it’s also part and parcel of the job. Not everyone, no matter how effectively I make my cases, will take my advice.

There was one comment from “The Other Barry” about complaints that I think bears highlighting.

Silly people.  High complaints means filters need to be more aggressive.   ”Not Spam” reports means the filters need to be less aggressive.  Low complaints means the filters are accurate.

The Other Barry is someone who has real world experience managing filtering for a large ISP.

In other comments, Steve White is excited to see ISP filtering come under judicial scrutiny. I’m not sure why, there is plenty of case law around filters already. There’s even US law stating ISPs can filter. But, hey, I’m sure some lawsuit from a company no one has ever heard of before will be sufficient to turn over 10 years of precedence.

Specifically, HolomaXx alleges, its Microsoft complaint rates have been consistently at or below 0.5 percent and its Yahoo complaint rates have been at or below 0.1 percent.

Spam-complaint rates are a significant metric ISPs use to determine if incoming email is wanted by recipients or not.

This is not exactly true. Sender who have mail blocked at the edge or filtered into the bulk folder have extremely low complaint rates.

I’ll say it again, because it is critically important to understand.

Bad senders who do not get email to the inbox have very low complaint rates.

Why? ISPs measure complaints as a percentage of the emails that make it to the inbox. If mail is not hitting the inbox then the complaint rates are zero.

I understand this is a bit of a catch 22, in that to get a good reputation you need to get mail to the inbox and to get mail to the inbox you need a good reputation. But I hear a lot of spammers tell me they absolutely can’t be sending spam because their complaint rates are so low and it’s just not true.

This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”

This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.

Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?

My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

Activist groups are attractive targets for forged signups. Think about it, when people get deeply involved in arguments on the internet, they often look for ways to harass the person on the other end of the disagreement. They will often signup the people they’re disagreeing with for mailing lists. When the disagreements are political, the logical target is a group on the other side of the political divide.

People also sign up spamtraps and bad addresses as a way to cause problems or harass the political group itself. Often this results in the activist group getting blocked. This never ends well, as instead of fixing the problem, the group goes yelling about how their voice is being silenced and their politics are being censored!!

No, they’re not being silenced, they’re running an open mailing list and a lot of people are on it who never asked to be on it. They’re complaining and the mail is getting blocked.

With that as background, I noticed one of the major political blogs announced their brand new mailing list today. Based on their announcement it seemed they that they may have talked to someone who knew about managing a mailing list.

Email activism is a key weapon in a modern activist organization’s arsenal, yet [website] has never jumped in. It was less a matter of will, and more a lack of resources and expertise. Managing a big email list is surprisingly complex, and we’ve been too small and overworked to do something we should’ve done a long time ago.

As a matter of professional curiosity, I signed up. What’s their signup like? Are they following best practices?

Sadly. No.

Their signup form asks for a first name, an email address and a zip code. Fill in the information and hit “submit.” The landing page says “Thanks for signing up” but provides none of the data that any delivery expert recommends. They mention nothing about frequency. They mention nothing about what they’re going to do with my email address.

They do send a welcome message almost immediately. It’s a bit bare bones:

Thanks for joining the [website] email action list!

If you would like to tell a friend to join, just point them to the following URL:

http://campaigns.example.com/signup_page/Signup1

Thanks again,
[signoff]
Founder, [website]

This should, at a minimum, have information about my signup and the chance to opt-out if there was an error. Comply with CAN SPAM, while not required as they are a political group, is such a minor thing they should be doing so. And, of course, this site is a big enough target, that I think they should be confirming every subscription. That will reduce the complaints from the targets of harassment and prevent people who don’t like them from being able to harm their delivery.

Should you ever contact someone who made an abuse complaint about your newsletter to find out why

My answer was: It depends, but it’s too complicated to explain in 140 characters.

I don’t suggest responding to people who hit the “this is spam” button as a way of complaining. FBLs are complaints, but they are people who don’t necessarily want to engage with you. If they wanted to engage they would have contacted you.

It’s a little trickier when you get complaints directly from recipients. There are a number of reasons people might send you a complaint directly: to honestly engage in a discussion about your mail, to try and track down who might be selling or signing up their email address or to vent their anger at bulk mailers in general.

You can’t always identify which type of recipient just from their initial email, but there are some hints. Complaints cc’d to dozens of email addresses generally aren’t looking for a response, they just want those evil spammers disconnected. Responses to this group of complainers will often be published on mailing lists, newsgroups or on websites. Attempting to engage them usually ends badly for everyone but the complainer.  (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4)

On the other hand, there are folks who are contacting you because they think you care about your network and will want to stop abuse from happening. My complaints, for instance, are often only sent to places I think will care. I’m not going to waste my time sending in a complaint to some place that just deletes them. So they tend to be very short and it can be productive to engage with them.

Not good enough for you? Want more specific rules? OK.

The two rules everyone must follow for good mail delivery.

• Send mail recipients expect and want to receive.
• Don’t monopolize resources that aren’t yours.

The secret to delivery is very simple: respect your recipients and respect the ISPs.

Everything else is an implementation detail. Those details are often important, but they’re just details. If you follow the two above rules then delivery will work.

Many people, delivery experts and ISP filtering staff, have very negative reactions to a sender who says “just tell me the rules and I’ll follow them.” But, you say, that’s not fair! If they want to know the rules it’s because they want to do things right! Experience suggest this isn’t true.

People who ask for “the rules” usually don’t actually want the rules. What they really want to know are the specific, hard thresholds they should meet. They want to know what the thresholds are for things like complaint rates and open rates and all the other things that ISPs use to measure reputation and engagement so they can tweak their program to coast along that line. They want to do the absolute minimum they have to do in order to pass. They’re not actually interested in sending mail people want, or sharing ISP resources. Instead they want to know how far they can push things without triggering a negative effect.

They expect an A for effort. If they don’t get the A for effort, then they want to argue the minutiae of the thresholds. They’ll argue with the ISPs. They’ll argue with their ESP compliance desk. They waste hours or days explaining why the thresholds are wrong or shouldn’t apply to them.

Don’t be that sender. Don’t spend so much time figuring out that if you have a 0.12% complaint rate you’ll get to the inbox and if you have a 0.125% complaint rate you’ll get bulk foldered.  Focus on sending relevant, engaging email that people want to receive. Your email marketing program will flourish and your boss will thank you for it.

Engagement comes when users REQUEST mail, not just concede to receive it. [...] Bottom line… Permission isn’t enough. Our best practices document says “Ensure that you are only sending mail to users who specifically requested it.” Look at your opt-in process. Are people really requesting your mail? If not, I’d bet you aren’t seeing the inbox delivery you’d like to see.

Requiring folks to give addresses in order to see content and get into restricted places on a website does not make for an engaged group of recipients. Many senders started doing this to force folks who didn’t want mail from the sender to give them an address. It was “permission” after a fashion. This kind of permission does come with low complaint rates, but low complaints are no longer sufficient for good, inbox delivery.

Engaged recipients come from sending mail recipients actually want to receive. If recipients feel coerced into submitting their email address, they are not actually asking for that mail and they don’t really want it. They are unengaged. Lack of engagement hurts reputation and delivery.

The AOL Enhanced Whitelist is for those senders that have very good practices. Senders on the EWL not only get their mail delivered to the inbox, but also have links and images enabled by default. Placement on the EWL is done solely on the basis of mail performance and only the best senders get on the list.

The new announcement this morning says that AOL will take more into account than just complaints. Previously, senders with the lowest complaint rates qualified for the EWL. Now, senders must also have a good reputation in addition to the low complaint rates. Good reputation is a measure of user engagement with a particular sender.

This change only reinforces what I and many other delivery experts have been saying: The secret to good delivery is to send mail recipients want. ISPs are making delivery decisions based on those measurements. Send mail that recipients want, and there are few delivery problems.

For a long time good delivery was tied closely to complaint rates, so senders focused on complaints. Spammers focused on complaints too, thus managing to actually get some of their spam delivered. ISPs noticed and started looking at other ways to distinguish wanted mail from spam. One of the better ways to separate spam from wanted mail is to look at user engagement. And the ISPs are measuring engagement and using that measurement as part of their decision making process. Send so much mail users don’t read it, and your reputation goes down followed by your delivery rates.

HT: Box of Meat