Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person didn’t actually know their email address. There are a lot of ways spamtraps can end up on lists that don’t involve malice on the part of the sender.

But I can’t help thinking that mailing an address for 10 years, where the person has never ever responded might be a sign that the address isn’t valid. Or that the recipient might not want what you’re selling or, is not actually a potential customer.

I wrote a few weeks back about the difference between delivery and marketing. That has sparked conversations, including one where I discovered there are a lot of marketers out there that loathe and despise delivery people. But it’s delivery people who understand that not every email address is a potential purchaser. Our job is to make sure that mail to non-existent “customers” doesn’t stop mail from actually getting to actual potential customers.

Email doesn’t have an equivalent of “occupant” or “resident.” Email marketers need to pay attention to their data quality and hygiene. In the snail mail world, that isn’t true. My parents still get marketing mail addressed to me, and I’ve not lived in that house for 20+ years. Sure, it’s possible an 18 year old interested in virginia slims might move into that house at some point, and maybe that 20 years of marketing will pay off. It only costs a few cents to keep that address on their list and the potential return is there.

In email, though, sending mail to addresses that don’t have a real recipient there has the potential to hurt delivery to all other recipients on your list. Is one or two bad addresses going to be the difference between blocked and inbox? No, but the more abandoned addresses and non-existent recipients on a list there are on a list, the more likely filters will decide the mail isn’t really important or wanted.

The cost of keeping that address, one that will never, ever convert on a list may mean losing access to the inbox of actual, real, converting customers.

For instance in many areas of marketing repetition is key. Repeat a slogan and forge an association between the slogan and the product in the mind of the consumer. More repetition is better. Marketers can even go so far as using the same ad to drive consumer action. Television advertising is a prime example of this. Companies don’t create new content for every advertising slot, they create one or a few ads and then replay them over and over. The advertiser doesn’t even really care if the consumer consciously ignores the ads. The unconscious connection is still being made.

In the world of email delivery, though, having many or most recipients ignore advertising is the kiss of death. Too many unengaged users and filters decide that mail shouldn’t go into the inbox. These don’t even have to be ISP level filters, but Bayesian filters built into desktop mail clients.

Sending repetitive ads over email may be an effective marketing strategy, but may not be an effective delivery strategy.

Am I off base here and missing something? Tell me I’m wrong in the comments.

“You’re an expert in the field, which ESP will give me the best inbox delivery?”

The thing is, there isn’t an answer to that question.

ESPs have expertise in sending large amounts of mail.  All have staff that manage and monitor MTAs. Most have staff that provide advice on delivery issues. Many have staff that handle abuse complaints, FBLs and blocks.

What they don’t have is magic delivery fairies or bat phones into postmaster desks.

Simply moving mail to an ESP won’t give you delivery. For the most part, delivery is the responsibility of the sender, whether they send mail through an in house system or through an ESP.

Delivery is primarily about how recipients react to a particular mail stream. Send mail recipients want, interact with and relate to and you usually see good delivery. The IP addresses or infrastructure contribute but do not dominate the equation. Sending from an ESP won’t fix poor content, irrelevant mail or unengaged recipients.

I can hear everyone now shouting at their screen “What about shared IPs!!!?!?!” Yes, yes, if you use an ESP with shared IP addresses and the ESP gets a bad customer you may see poor delivery for a time because one of their other customers was bad. It’s a fact, it happens. Plus, if you use an ESP with dedicated IPs and the ESP gets a bad customer you may see poor delivery for a time because one of the other customers was bad and their IP is near yours.

So clearly the answer is to bring email in house. That way no other company can affect your delivery, right? Yes. Kinda.

Are you willing to invest money in hiring email and DNS savvy sysadmins? Invest money in a MTA designed to handle bulk mail? Invest in an expert who not only understands bounce handling, but can explain to your developers what a good bounce handling system must do? Invest in someone who can manage authentication like DKIM? Who can handle delivery issues and understands how to talk to ISPs? Invest in development to write a FBL processor?

For some companies, the internal investment is the right answer, and bringing mail in house makes business sense.

For a lot of companies, though, they just want to use email to communicate with customers. They don’t want to have to invest in multiple staff members (as it’s very rare to find a single person with all the various skill sets needed) to just send a weekly newsletter, or daily sales email. They need a tool that works, they don’t need to know how to sign up for a FBL, they don’t need to know how to handle bounces. They can outsource that work and focus on the communication value.

Finding the best ESP starts with finding out how you want to use email.

Question 1: What role does email play in my business?

The reality is many of the people at ISPs and blocklists don’t want to talk to these types of senders. They may answer a friendly question from someone they know and trust, but sometimes not even then.

Some very large ISPs and major blocklists don’t even take sender questions. They won’t communicate with anyone about any delivery issues.

I’ve had to tell more than a few clients recently that various ISPs and blocklists weren’t interested in helping those clients with their delivery problems. There are two classes of reactions I get from clients. Some clients focus on moving forward. “OK, now what? How can we identify the issue, what data do we have and how can we figure out what the problem is?”

Other clients continue to look for ways to talk to whomever is blocking their mail. They’re convinced if they can just “explain their business model” or be told what they’re doing wrong, that all their delivery problems will magically disappear.

Needless to say those clients who focus on moving forward and looking at the information they do have have much better success resolving their delivery problems. What many senders don’t understand is the wealth of data they have that will help them resolve the issue. And even if they know it’s buried in their files, they don’t always know where to start looking or even what they’re looking for.

But that is, of course, why you hire someone like me who understands spamfiltering and email. I help senders understand how email filters work and identify what parts of their programs are likely to be responsible for delivery issues. I often find the most valuable service I provide to clients is a fresh set of eyes that can see the forest. With my help, they manage to stop obsessing unproductively about one particular symptom and focus on the underlying problems.

Senders who think the holy grail of problem resolution is speaking to the right person at an ISP or blocklist generally are disappointed, even when they hire someone who knows all the right people at the ISPs.  They can’t always get what they want. But I can often help them get what they need.

There were two major changes to email accounts in the early 2000′s that led to the rise of zombie emails.

People started decoupling their internet access from their email addresses. Free addresses were easy to get and could be checked from everywhere. No longer did they have to dial in to get email, they could access it from outside the office and outside the home. Mobile devices, including the first generation of smart phones and laptops, helped drive people to use email addresses that they could access from any network. The easy access to free mail accounts and the permanence led people to adopt those addresses as their primary address.

When people changed addresses, for whatever reason, they didn’t have to stop paying. There was no way to tell the free ISPs to stop accepting mail for that address. Free mail providers would let addresses linger for months or years after the user had stopped logging in. Sometimes those addresses would fill up and start bouncing email, but they were not often turned off by the ISPs.

The lack of purging of abandoned addresses was the start of dead addresses accumulating on mailing lists. But there weren’t that many addresses in this state, and eventually they would fill up with mail. When they were full the ISP would stop accepting new mail for that account, and the address would bounce off a mailing list.

Everything changed with the entrance of Gmail onto the scene. When Gmail launched in 2004 they were providing a whole GB of storage for email accounts a totally unheard of storage capacity. Within a year they were providing multiple gigabytes of storage. Other freemail systems followed Gmail’s lead and now all free accounts have nearly unlimited storage. Plus, any mail in the spam folder was purged after a few weeks and bulk mail doesn’t count against the users’ storage quota. Now, an abandoned email account will almost never fill up thus senders can’t use over quota bounces to identify abandoned accounts.

Now we’re stuck in a situation where SMTP replies can’t be used to identify that there is no one home inside a particular email account. Senders can’t distinguish between a quiet subscriber and an abandoned address. ISPs, however, can and are using zombie addresses as a measure of a senders reputation.

On Monday we’ll talk about why and how zombie addresses can affect delivery. (Zombie emails: part 3)

Tuesday, we’ll talk about strategies to protect your list from being taken over by zombies. (Zombie Apocalypse)

The back door is open, and he can get from outside the back door to outside the side door in a minute, tops. But he wants to go out the side door.

(I’d get up and open the side door for him anyway, but I have another cat asleep on my lap and it’s not fair to move her just because Grover is being difficult).

I’ve been having a discussion with him:

Grover, the back door is open.
But I want to go out the side door.
You could go out the back door and then go round to the side door.
But I want to go out the side door.

Grover the tomcat

What makes this more than just Friday Cat Blogging (not that there’s anything wrong with that) is that the conversation I’m having with Grover reminds me of the discussions Laura and I both regularly have with clients with delivery problems.

I want to go in the inbox
You’ll need to clean up your subscription process, and set recipients expectations better
But I want to go in the inbox
And you need to handle bounces properly, then you’ll start to go in the inbox
But I want to go in the inbox
And you need to send mail that looks like your real email, not just test messages, to get to your customers inboxes
But I want to go in the inbox
And it may take a week or two for all the changes you make to really affect your reputation at the recipients ISP
But I want to go in the inbox now

When you hire someone to help with your email campaign, you’ll need to actually follow their advice before they can help you.

Don’t be the tomcat.

When we talk about sender behaviour we’ll often dive headfirst into the technical details of how that’s monitored and tracked – history of mail from the same IP address, SPF records, good reverse DNS, send rates and ramping, polite SMTP level behaviour, DKIM and domain-based reputation and so on. If all of those are OK and the mail still doesn’t get delivered then you might throw up your hands, fall back on “it’s content-based filtering” and not leave it at that.

There’s just as much detail and scope for diagnosis in content-based filtering, though, it’s just a bit more complex, so some delivery folks tend to gloss over it. If you’re sending mail that people want to receive, you’re sure you’re sending the mail technically correctly and you have a decent reputation as a sender then it’s time to look at the content.

You want your mail to look just like wanted mail from reputable, competent senders and to look different to unwanted mail, viruses, phishing emails, botnet spoor and so on. And not just to mechanical spam filters – if a postmaster looks at your email, you want it to look clean, honest and competently put together to them too.

Some of the distinctive content differences between wanted and unwanted email are due to the content as written by the sender, some of them are due to senders of unwanted email trying to hide their identity or their content, but many of them are due to the different quality software used to send each sort of mail. Mail clients used by individuals, and content composition software used by high quality ESPs tends to be well written and complies with both the email and MIME RFCs, and the unwritten best common practices for email composition. The software used by spammers, botnets, viruses and low quality ESPs tends not to do so well.

Here’s a (partial) list of some of the things to consider:

MIME Structure

Good email tends to be either plain text or a multipart mail consisting of two versions of the same message, one in HTML and one in plain text.

Bad email often doesn’t have the plain text part. Either it’s missing altogether, or it’s completely different (much shorter) content than the HTML part.

Text Encoding

Bad email often tries to hide it’s content from spam filters. One common way of doing this is to use base64 encoding for text where quoted-printable encoding would be appropriate.

Lazy software developers sometimes base64 encode everything, as it’s less work than deciding which encoding is appropriate for a message part. Doing that looks dishonest or incompetent to filters and postmasters.

Images

Another way bad email tries to hide it’s content is by misuse of images. The most obvious example of this is mail that consists of just a single huge image – sometimes that’s just because it’s easier for the graphic designer to do that way, but more often it’s a spammer trying to hide their content from filters. Either way, it’s much less likely to be delivered.

Including CAN-SPAM required boilerplate (such as the postal address) purely as an image is another thing that’s distinctive to bad email. Bad email hides the contact address in that way so as to avoid people being able to search based on it to track their behaviour across brands and shell companies, and to stop people using it to key targeted spam filters on. Good email doesn’t need to do that.

HTML Structure

If your email is completely unreadable with images not displayed, it’s not going to be a good marketing piece in the (common) case that images aren’t shown. Including appropriate ALT text for each image not only makes it look better to recipients when images are turned off, it also makes it look more legitimate to postmasters with ticketing systems that don’t display images, or only show the raw HTML. It sometimes makes spam filters happier too.

That’s just one example of sending “good” html.

Phishy URLs

Bad email sent by phishers often includes links that look like <a href=”http://phisher.ru/”>bank.com</a>, where the message is trying to look like legitimate email from bank.com, but it’s sending readers to phisher.ru instead. <a href=”http://bank.com.whatever.phisher.ru/”>bank.com</a> is an even more obvious attempt to defraud the recipient.

Otherwise good email sent by naive ESPs often includes links that look like <a href=”http://click.esp.com?trackdata=xxxx&target=bank.com/”>bank.com</a>. To a spam filter, that looks much the same as a typical phishing URL, and the delivery is not going to go well.

Bad Phrasing or Appearance

Even if 100% of your recipients desperately wait for every issue of your newsletter there are some phrases that will cause you more problems than others. “Looking spammy” is one of the worst things for your email if you need to discuss a delivery issue with a postmaster or a filter vendor – if it “looks like spam” they’re much less likely to believe it’s really wanted by recipients.

If your newsletter is about “Moustache Rides” (real example, I’m not making this up) then you might not be able to fix the phrasing, but you should try and make the rest of the newsletter look professionally put together, as much as you can anyway.

URL Reputation

If two emails received “look similar” and the recipient complained about the first one, it’s likely the second one will be unwanted too. But mechanically detecting similar content is complex and expensive to do, so a common trick is to “fingerprint” each email by looking for distinctive features in it, and considering messages that share a fingerprint to be similar.

One of the simpler fingerprints to use is the URLs used in links in the mail, more specifically the hostnames of the links. If someone is sending bad email and you send email using the same URLs or hostnames, it’s likely to be treated poorly.

Fiddly Trivia

There are lots of other fiddly little things that spam filters key on too. You shouldn’t obsess about them too much, but it’s worth being aware of the sort of things that can make a difference. SpamAssassin publish some of the rules they use. If you look at the rules, look at the scores too – a rule with a score of 0.001 isn’t very relevant.

Over the last week or so there’s been a lot of tweeting going on about Ben and Jerry’s GIVING UP EMAIL MARKETING!!! Only, come to find out, that’s not what they’re doing. Yes, they are moving more into the social networking arena but they will be continuing to connect with subscribers through email. Today many are tweeting that perhaps they “jumped the cow” with their initial reports of email abandonment by B&J.

Watching the ongoing discussions led me to wonder if a lot of email marketers are so focused on the trees that they miss the forest? Are they so disconnected from how people actually use email, and social networks for that matter, that they spend way to much time chasing a response and not enough time thinking about what they’re saying and doing?

Email marketing discussions often focus on a limited number of things, the biggest are how to get mail to the inbox and how to get recipients to engage. Many marketers spend time and money looking for the elusive combination of factors that will get their mail to the inbox and impel the recipient to give the sender money. The focus is on details like color and pre-headers and length and timing and content above and below the fold and the perfect call to action.

The discussions focus almost exclusively on the sender and only mention the subscriber in passing. That is understandable on one level. Senders can only control one end of the equation and figuring out what inputs compel the best response from the other side is what marketing is all about.

But there’s another part of email marketing, and that is that subscribers invite marketers into their inboxes. When someone subscribes to a newsletter or mail from a company they’re offering that company the opportunity to interact with them in their personal space. This is, in fact, the holy grail of marketing having the customer invite contact from a seller.

I suspect this is why the rumors of Ben and Jerry’s abandoning email had people all up in arms. A  company abandoning a channel where they had an engaged and interested audience? PREPOSTEROUS! What’s happening to email as marketing?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t pay much attention because it was such a silly idea. Any marketer worth their salt wouldn’t give up a way to interact with customers. Ben and Jerry’s is a company with an almost cult like following. Anyone who was going to subscribe to a B&J newsletter was going to want that mail (new flavors! coupons! new locations! inside information!).

Someone started a rumor, though, that B&J were abandoning email marketing and everyone focusing on the trees grabbed that story and ran with it. They were so focused on the details they didn’t take a step back and think about what they were repeating. Had they taken a step back and thought about the forest they would have realized how silly the idea of B&Js abandoning email as a customer communication channel was.