Experian CheetahMail believes that opt-out email appending is no longer an acceptable practice, and that marketers should no longer use of this practice to acquire customer email addresses. EmailResponsibly

In my experience, appending causes major delivery problems. Of course, every time the issue comes up some marketer tells us who think it’s a bad idea that they successfully used appending and it worked and all the delivery problems are a figment.

Maybe the supporters will believe Ben and Experian / CheetahMail that appending is not a good thing to do. After all, Ben was a large proponent of the practice many years ago and Experian still sells appending services in some countries.

Sending mail without permission, which is what appending usually is, will cause delivery problems. Stick to real permission, not vague promises.

If any of you get the opportunity to go to a talk presented by any of the Return Path folks I encourage you to do so. They know their stuff and their presentations are full of good information.

One of the trends mentioned is the increase in reliance on domain reputation. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. I wrote a little bit about it recently, but have focused more on the whole realm of content filtering rather than just domain reputation.

Domain reputation is where delivery is going. And I think a lot of senders are going to struggle with delivery as they find that IP reputation is not enough to get into the inbox.

I want to thank Kerry and the rest of the staff there for the opportunity to talk email and filtering with their readers.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone in the US.

parties can’t reach an agreement if they’re not even having the same conversation.

I realized this is just as true in email as it is in politics. All too often we’re not having the same conversation. Look at the comments thread on my spamtraps post. Steve Henderson and I weren’t having the same conversation. He believes spam is illegal and that identifying email as spam is the same as calling the sender a criminal. I don’t think spam is illegal and am not making any comments about the legal status of the sender.

This is one recent example, but it’s not an unique occurrence. Failing to have the same conversation is rampant in the email space. One of the more obvious situations where this happens is when dealing with blocks.

The blocked sender tells the blocking recipient, “We don’t send spam! Remove the block, please!” The sender thinks this is the relevant bit of information and that all they need to do is assert that they aren’t intentionally sending spam.

The blocking recipient looks at their systems, they look at their customer data, they look at the patter of email and say, “We can’t remove this block.” The receiver thinks this is the relevant bit of information. They work on data, not intentions.

I frequently describe my job as translating from sender to receiver. I sit in the middle of the conversation and make sure both sides are having the same conversation.

In politics and in email delivery, the only way things get done is when both sides have the same conversation. Understanding the goals and perspectives of the “the other side” is critical to getting what you want.

Then Smartinsights published an insightful and useful article on choosing an ESP yesterday.

So, yeah, just go read what Jordie has to say. I have a couple other things to add, but I’ll drop those in another post.

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.

I sympathize with Ben, and commend his staff. I often get potential clients asking me if I can guarantee I can get their mail to the inbox or get them off a public or private blocklist. And, the answer really is no, I can’t guarantee anything. Much of delivery is solely in the hands of the actual sender. Sure, ESPs can enforce a certain standard of behaviour and they can do all the technical things right. And consultants like me can tell you how ISP spam filters work and explain how some of your choices and processes affect delivery. But none of us can guarantee inbox delivery.

Only one company has tried to guarantee inbox delivery, and they shut down earlier this year because they were non-viable and couldn’t get enough of a recipient userbase to attract customers.

For the rest of us, though, the best we can do is give senders the tools and information they need to succeed in getting mail delivered to the inbox.

Some points worth mentioning.

• Facebook is giving detailed response codes allowing senders to identify technical problems and policy problems. They’re also giving time frames for how long policy problems might last.
• Facebook is requiring some sort of domain authentication to send mail. While they are not outright rejecting unauthenticated mail, they are reserving the right to deliver unauthenticated mail slower than authenticated mail.
• Facebook is not promoting the use of their messaging system for bulk mail. Based on Zuc’s announcement, this shouldn’t come to a surprise to anyone. This also means they’re not providing any resolution services for delivery problems. They’re also not providing a feedback loop.
• Facebook is not accepting mail from dynamic IP addresses, and are using the PBL as one part of that screening.

While digging through my blog posts to see if there was any help I could provide, I realized I don’t have a guide to resolving blocking issues at ISPs. Much of the troubleshooting can be done without ever contacting the ISPs or the blocklists.

Identify the issue.

There are a number of techniques that ISPs use to protect their users from malicious or problematic mail, from rate-liming incoming mail, putting mail in the bulk folder, or blocking specific IP addresses. Step one to resolving any delivery problem is to identify what is happening to the mail. In order to resolve the issue, you have to know what the issue is.

All too often, the description of a delivery problem is: My mail isn’t getting delivered. But that isn’t very clear as to what the actual problem is. Are you being temp failed? Is mail being blocked? Is mail going to the bulk folder? Is this something affecting just you or is it a widespread problem?

Troubleshoot your side.

Collect as much data about the problem as you can. Dig through logs and get copies of any rejection messages. Follow any URLs that are present in the bounce messages. Try sending a bare bones email to yourself at that ISP with just URLs, is it still blocked? What if you send from a different IP, does the same thing happen?

There is a lot of troubleshooting a sender can do without having to contact an ISP, and the information can lead to resolution that doesn’t involve having to contact the ISP. Also, many current ISP blocks are dynamic, they come up and go down without any human intervention. Those blocks that require contact to get them resolved have clear instructions in the bounce message.

Fix your stuff.

Whether it’s a reputation issue or a minor technical issue, fix the problem on your end. Just moving IP addresses or changing a URL isn’t a sustainable fix. There is a reason mail is being blocked or filtered and if you don’t fix that issue, the blocks are just going to come back. After you do fix your stuff, expect to see changes in a few days or a week. The ISP filters are generally quite responsive to sender improvements so if you’ve fixed the stuff you should see changes pretty quickly. Expect unblocking or filtering to take a little longer than the block was in place.

If you can’t figure out what the problem is, hire a consultant. Here at Word to the Wise we can often quickly identify a problem and provide a path to resolution. Sometimes the problem isn’t even the ISPs, we’ve had multiple cases where our clients were using custom software and their software wasn’t SMTP compliant and we were able to identify the problem and get their mail working again. There are a host of other independent consultants out there that can also help you identify and resolve blocking problems.

Contact the ISPs.

If there is a hard block or after fixing what you think the underlying problem is, you’ll have to contact the ISP. Many ISPs provide self service websites and contact forms to facilitate this process. Generally, though, most issues aren’t going to require contact.