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.

In a number of cases they discovered that certain kinds of templates kept getting flagged as spam, even when Mailchimp was sure that the sender had permission and the recipients wanted the mail. They analyzed some of these false positives and identified some of the reasons that naive users may identify those particular emails as spam.

Ben concludes:

When you send a lot of email marketing, even to a totally permission-based double opt-in list, you’re going to get some spam complaints from your recipients. It’s inevitable. Sometimes, it’s because they’re too lazy to click your unsub link, they think the “spam” button is the unsub link, or sometimes it’s because they forgot signing up to your list (maybe because you send infrequently, like me).

And sometimes, when your email is marked as spam, a human from an ISP, or a human from an anti-spam organization, will actually do a manual review of your email [...] they look at your email, and they make a split-second decision to “blacklist or not.”

It’s not only the humans that look at the mail and make decisions based on how the mail looks. There are also spam filters that look at how similar mail is to spam and if it’s too similar it will get blocked.

Sending mail that doesn’t look like spam is important. Mailchimp’s research only confirms that fact. Luckily, spammers are often lazy, so it’s not that difficult to design templates and email messages that don’t look like spam.

It looks like something is not working right over there, and hammering retries doesn’t seem to be helping. The best recommendation is for senders to back off overnight and test some sends tomorrow.

1. Find out whether mail is actually being blocked, or whether the customer just went to one of the jumbo economy blacklist checker sites.
2. If no mail is being blocked, it’s not an issue.
3. If mail is being deferred (Yahoo…) it’s not the same issue as being blocked, and likely isn’t worth pursuing.
4. If mail is being blocked, don’t take the customers word for why. If they got an email rejected by, say, Earthlink for some reason and then went to the blacklist checker and discovered that they’re listed on FIVETEN, they might grab onto that listing like a rabid terrier when it’s really an irrelevant rathole.
5. Start with the rejection message. If it has a URL in it, that’s all you need to start with.
6. If not, see if it’s consistent – does test mail get rejected. If not, it’s either a transient issue or it’s a content-based block rather than an IP based block, and hence not your problem.
7. If there’s no URL in the rejection, contact the entity that blocked the mail, perhaps.
8. Make a good judgement call about whether it’s worth caring. If it’s just one guy in his Mom’s basement blocking mail then it’s not worth the time or energy to care about the issue.
9. If this is really business-critical for the customer then they should talk to a decent consultant rather than relying on their abuse desk for assistance.

What business advantage is there to an ISP in offering a feedback loop? I’ve never really seen one.

It’s a good question. There’s a fair bit of work involved in offering, maintaining and supporting a feedback loop. What makes it worth it?

At a consumer ISP there’s some email sent to customers that’s easy for spam filters to recognize and handle correctly. On one end of the spectrum viruses, herbal pills spam and spam from botnets is easy to recognize and block, while on the other end individual one-to-one mail from regular correspondents is easy to recognize and deliver. Most ISPs handle the easy messages well, so their customers experience with their spam filtering will be dominated by the harder messages to handle in the grey areas between these two extremes.

Of the unwanted email that ends up in recipients mailboxes the hardest, by far, to filter out is “legitimate bulk mail” – mail that’s coming from legitimate companies that’s likely to be wanted by a big fraction of the recipients. Some recipients want to receive the mail, others don’t object to receiving it, while others consider it unwanted spam. As any particular mailing of this type will look just the same and come from the same source a typical spam filter will find it nearly impossible to make the right decisions for all recipients.

The This-Is-Spam button allows an ISP to handle this sort of mail on a per-user basis, by providing an easy way for the user to flag the message as unwanted in a uniform way. The ISP can use that information both to tune user-specific mail filtering and to send a feedback loop report to the bulk sender. The bulk sender can use that report to stop sending mail to that customer and, maybe more importantly, it allows the bulk senders to tune their processes so as to fix the problem of sending mail to recipients who don’t want it. It gives the senders a metric to measure their process changes against – a pretty good metric.

That reduces the amount of unwanted email seen in customer inboxes, especially the unwanted email that’s very hard to filter in other ways. That leads to a better customer experience, which leads to happier customers and less customer churn. Customer churn is expensive in many ways other than the obvious problem that each customer lost is a monthly payment lost. It also leads to increased marketing costs to bring in new customers to replace those that are lost, and significantly increased technical support costs as new customers are brought onto the network.

“Too much spam” is a very commonly given reason by customers who are changing from one ISP to another, so controlling the hard to manage spam in this way – both directly and indirectly by improving bulk senders practices – can have a significant benefit to the ISPs bottom line.

• What are your favorite delivery resources?
• What are your most used delivery resources?
• What types of things would you like to be available but haven’t found?
• What resources do you make available and would like included?

Speaking of the wiki, we had an invasion by a bunch of botnets putting up garbage spam links. We tried a few things to stop it, but the only thing that worked was prohibiting anonymous editing. I am still looking at other measures (and if anyone out there has dealt with this before and has some ideas, I’m all ears) but for right now you have to register and be confirmed before you can edit anything. Blame the spammers (I do).

Please list your resources or helpful links in the comments and I’ll pull them together and put them up for everyone to share.

I posted A very young industry commenting on the lack of experience among email marketers. I think that some of the conflict between ISPs and ESPs and receivers and marketers can be traced back to this lack of longevity and experience. Often there is only a single delivery expert at a company. These people often have delivery responsibilities dropped on them without any real training or warning. They have to rely on outside resources to figure out how to do their job and often that means leaning on ISPs for training.

JD Falk described how many at ISPs feel about this in his post With great wisdom…

we’re also tired with teaching the same thing to people with the same title, and feeling like the message never gets through. Part of what we’re saying is “It’s your industry, you’ve learned this stuff, now you teach ‘em.”

His comments are similar to comments I’ve heard from many people behind the spamfilters at ISPs and spam filtering companies. Some ESPs go through delivery folks almost yearly. Those new delivery folks then reach out to the ISPs and ask the same question their predecessor asked a year ago which, in turn, was the same question that their predecessor asked the year before that. Really, the ISPs don’t like repeating themselves like this. I keep telling them they should just cut and paste their previous answers until the questions change.

Finally, Phil Schott posted You must be present to win pointing out the lack of resources.

There’s no books on this stuff and you can’t go to school to get your BA in deliverability. All we’ve got is each other.

While he’s right and there are no books or school lessons, I’m not quite sure how useful they would be. Things in the email space change very fast and what was true a few months ago may not be true now. However, there are some resources for people who want to learn about delivery. I have been working on the delivery wiki as a place to categorize and clearly present information to people. MAAWG holds training sessions for senders at every conference (and they’re always looking for suggestions for what kind of training sessions people want). There are other conferences and meetings that offer delivery help.

I think there are other options as well. But the real solution is more involvement and more information sharing between delivery professionals. The knowledge is there and we can share it among ourselves. We don’t need to rely on the overworked and underpaid staff at the ISPs to teach the newbies how to do their jobs.

I often have the pleasure of putting my four year-old son to bed at night and I’m usually exhausted afterward. It’s a never-ending string of questions and admonishments that goes something like this,

“Daddy, is it a stay-at-home day tomorrow?

“No, Joe, tomorrow is a go-to-school day, it’s Tuesday. Joe, stop talking and go to sleep and please stop picking your nose.”

“Daddy, how long until the Easter bunny comes?”

“A few weeks. Now, go to sleep and stop picking your nose, Josef.”

“Dude, what did I say about picking your nose?”

“Sorry daddy, I can’t help it. It’s my job.”

“Daddy, When’s it going to be my birthday?”

“Joe, you’re not going to live to see your birthday if you don’t stop picking your nose and go to sleep.”

Lather, rinse, repeat for about 10-30 minutes every night. Same questions, same answers, always picking his nose.

In retrospect it seems funny and maybe sweet, but it never does at the time and the thought of doing it all over again tomorrow night makes me want to run out screaming.

However, I realize that if not me, who? Who’s going to tell Joe to stop picking his nose? Who’s going to answer his questions? I have to. It’s my job. If I want to be his dad, that’s what I’ve got to do. If not, then I don’t get to be his dad, I don’t get to be part of his life, and I don’t get to be part of my family.

There are folks in our industry just like Joe and me–those who never seem to get it, those who ask questions over and over, and those who tire of answering the same questions.

I’d like to thank those who answer those questions over and over. Folks like Al Iverson, JD Falk, Mickey Chandler, Greg Kraios, Ken Magill, Laura Atkins, Steve Atkins, Karen Balle, Annalivia Ford, and many others who deserve to be on this list.

I’ve only been in deliverability for a few years and I’d be nowhere if these folks hadn’t answered my dumb questions, posted their thoughts, shared their knowledge, and told me to stop picking my nose on occasion.

It pains me though to read from time to time the ranting of those in our industry who want to decry the dumb marketer, give up, and take their ball home. It’s a shame, but that’s their right and their decision. However, they then don’t get to be part of the community. They lose the effectiveness to tell a dumb marketer to stop picking his nose. They become a washed-up, has been, curmudgeon with no voice. Like with my four year-old son, if I want to be a part of the deliverability community I’ve got to stick it out and deal with it. You have to be present to win.

In her post, A very young industry, Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise quotes ExactTarget’s Joel Book as stating that less than 20% of those in email marketing have more than two years experience. Yes, it’s an industry full of four year-olds. If you’re one of those in the know are you going to bemoan this fact that’s beyond your control or are you going to work to make the community you’ve helped build a better place? You absolutely can choose to move on. We will miss you and I wish you the best of luck. But either keep helping out as you’ve expertly done or get out of the way. Don’t take cheap shots at those trying to do the right thing and trying to do some good work.

For those of you tired of answering the same inane questions you’re fooling yourself if you think the folks who really need to hear your message are reading. They’re not. And they’re going to keep on asking their inane questions until somebody helps them out. I choose to help them out. I choose to be part of the community. I choose to be present.

A big part of the issue is how daunting it can be to ask for help without the risk of appearing the fool. There are far too many folks in this business of deliverability who are more interested in proving how smart they are and selectively sharing knowledge than they are in helping raise the overall level of consciousness and enlightenment.

If you want the idiots and fools to go away then help them become something more. Help them like no one helped you when you started out. With much effort, time, and frustration, I could pick through five years of your blog posts to find the one bit of information I need, or you could give me the URL to the post that will reveal all. I’m not asking you to spoon feed me, I’m just asking for a little help. There’s no books on this stuff and you can’t go to school to get your BA in deliverability. All we’ve got is each other.

Phil Schott has been handling delivery and compliance for a major ESP for the last 3 and a half years.

There was certainly some surprise in the room when I pointed out (yep, it was me) that Laura has been around since before there were ESPs. Part of it, I’m sure, was because Laura’s not particularly ancient — and part was because it’s a shock to realize that people sent and received email and everything was just fine long before the segment of the industry that you work in had even been imagined.

Since this was at MAAWG, there were quite a few people in the room who were involved before there were ESPs (I asked for a show of hands) — and it was interesting to see how many of them work for ESPs now. Commenting on Laura’s article “A very young industry,” Kent McGovern mentioned three — including Anne Mitchell, who made up the word “deliverability” not long after stepping down as the head lawyer for the first shared blacklist of email-sending IP addresses.

Just think about that. She was the head lawyer for the MAPS RBL before there was such a thing as deliverability. (I worked with her there; so did Laura.)

There are a lot of us who’ve been around that long, and most don’t work in the deliverability/marketing side of the industry. Nearly all of us have become cynical over the years; some were cynical to begin with. A few, sadly, have burned out entirely from the frustration of having the same arguments, same discussions, over and over and over.

I think some of the recent refrain calling for ESPs to pressure each other into better practices comes in part from that same frustration. Yes, bad practices are bad, but we’re also tired with teaching the same thing to people with the same title, and feeling like the message never gets through. Part of what we’re saying is “It’s your industry, you’ve learned this stuff, now you teach ‘em.”

And when you do, it does work — far more often than when we say it, because you speak the same language. There’s now a generation (for lack of a better term) of ESP & deliverability staff who weren’t around before there were ESPs, maybe not even before CAN-SPAM, but have learned many of the same things and undergone similar transformation. Who’d have thought that Jaren Angerbauer — quite possibly the nicest guy in the industry — would ever start sighing at those young whippersnappers like a cynical old anti-spammer? And Jaren’s not only teaching deliverabilitators; he’s also teaching college students, ensuring that they’ll know far more when they enter the work force than you or he did.

We old-timers once struggled with the idea that we must reach out — even to people we disagree with — and teach what we knew, learning along the way to put it into terms that marketers understand. It’s so much simpler to add to a blacklist and throw away they key, declaring “not my problem anymore.” But we did start teaching, and look how far we’ve come; we’re still doing it, and look how much further there is to go.

Now it’s time for the next generation to do the same. Stop looking to us, or to the ISPs, to solve the problems of your industry for you; we’re busy dealing with spam, as we should’ve been doing all along. Your colleagues’ cluelessness is exactly as impermanent as your own was, and can be overcome in the same ways. Whether you have fifteen or ten or five or merely two years of experience, you’ve found your way to this blog and read down to this line, and attained some measure of wisdom, and you can ease the passage for others.

When someone at a marketing conference says something that you know isn’t true, that you know will result in poor deliverability and industry ire, call them on it. Engage them in a dialogue. Teach, explain, cajole, push — because with great wisdom comes great responsibility.

It’s your turn.

J.D. Falk is Director of Product Strategy for Receiver Products at Return Path, which is not an ESP.

less than 20% of ppl in #emailmarketing have more than 2 yrs experience

I have this feeling that some of the industry wide issues with conflicts between “frat boys” and “utilitarians” is partly due to the lack of experience on the email marketing side. Contrast that with the ISP side, where many people have 10 or 20 years experience with email.

If we take for a fact that Joel is correct and 80% of email marketers have less than 2 years of experience, how does that affect the way email marketers approach email and delivery issues? More importantly, how does this affect deliverability? Does it affect the perception of email marketing and email marketers by the ISPs and spam blocking companies?

What does it mean for the state of the industry that so few people on one side of the equation have long term experience in email marketing and so many people on the other side of the equation have long term experience with email (and marketing)?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, triggered by one of the session moderators at MAAWG introducing me as “someone who has been in the industry since before there were ESPs.” Yes, I’ve been around a long time, and his comment is accurate, if a bit disturbing.

Being around for as long as I have doesn’t just mean I have experience dealing with different problems, but also provides a deep understanding of where we are now and how we got here. The history of delivery, spam fighting and email marketing are all intertwined but never documented. Knowing that history is vital for mapping the future.

I can’t help but think that the lack of experience of the majority of the people in this industry is hindering delivery and effective email marketing. There are so few of us who could be considered old hands, is that hindering the industry as a whole?