Anyhow, Mickey beat me to it and posted much of what I was going to say about Ken Magill’s response to a very small quote from Neil’s guest post on expiring email headers last week.

I, too, was at that meeting, and at many other meetings where marketers and the folks that run the ISP spam filters end up in the same room. I don’t think the marketers always understand what is happening inside the postmaster and filtering desks on a day to day basis at the ISPs. Legitimate marketing? It’s a small fraction of the mail they deal with. Ken claims that marketing pays the salaries of these employees and they’d be out of a job if marketing didn’t exist. Possibly, but only in the context that they are paid to keep their employers servers up and running so that the giant promises made by the marketing team of faster downloads and better online experiences actually happen.

If there wasn’t an internet and there weren’t servers to maintain, they’d have good jobs elsewhere. They’d be building trains or designing buildings or any of the thousands of other jobs that require smart technical people.

Ken has no idea what these folks running the filters and keeping your email alive deal with on a regular basis. They deal with the utter dregs and horrors of society. They are the people dealing with unrelenting spam and virus and phishing attacks bad enough to threaten to take down their networks and the networks of everyone else. They also end up dealing with law enforcement to deal with criminals. Some of what they do is deal with is unspeakable, abuse and mistreatment of children and animals. These are the folks who stand in front of the rest of us, and make the world better for all of us.

They should be thanked for doing their job, not chastised because they’re doing what the people who pay them expect them to be doing.

Yes, recipients want the mail they want. But, y’know, I bet they really don’t want all the bad stuff that the ISPs protect against. Ken took offense at a statement that he really shouldn’t have. ISPs do check their false positive rates on filtering, and those rates are generally less than 1% of all the email that they filter. Marketers should be glad they’re such a small part of the problem. They really don’t want to be a bigger part.

How do you gently educate one’s customers or employer to use permission-based marketing?

Ken published the responses in his Tuesday newsletter. For a number of reasons I didn’t participate in the conversation, but I’ve been thinking about the question a lot. How do I evangelize permission? Do I evangelize permission?

I wrote down a few of the things I’ve done to where permission has been part of the conversation in the last 14 years.

• I’ve talked with hundreds of big and small companies privately about permission and sending only opt-in email.
• I’ve publicly commented on permission to the FTC.
• I’ve participated in private discussions between spammers and anti-spammers searching for that middle ground.
• I’ve participated in public discussions on policy and delivery.
• I’ve worked with dozens of Spamhaus listees to clean up their permission practices and get them delisted.
• I’ve worked an abuse desk for a large network provider.
• I’ve consulted for some of the worst ROKSO spammers out there.
• I’ve evangelized to large companies who think their mail can’t be spam.
• I’ve worked with small entrepreneurs who just wanted to use email to talk to their customers and investors.
• I’ve worked with companies that send me email to fix some of their minor bobbles in practice.
• I’ve blogged for years on email delivery and permission.

Permission weaves its way through almost every conversation I have about email and delivery. But it’s not the sole thing I focus on when dealing with customers. What I really evangelize, rather than permission, is that a successful email marketing program is based on sending mail people want. Having permission from the recipient makes it oh so much easier to send mail those recipients want and are actively engaged in.

When working with clients to fix a delivery problem or just teach them about mail delivery, I don’t say a lot about permission. I talk more about mail people want and mail people expect and mail people are engaged with. Permission is but a small part of accomplishing all of those things. Mailers who focus solely on the technical specifics of permission “They checked the box!” or “But they gave me their email address!” often face many of the same delivery challenges as mailers who buy guaranteed opt-in lists from the broker down the street.

Mail delivery is not just about the buzzword ‘permission’. Rather it’s about a much broader, much more complex model of the relationship between email senders, ISPs, recipients and the rest of the email ecosystem. ‘Permission’ is a part of that, but just a part.

Many people, including some of the Only Influencers participants, want a very simple description of the world and a list of rules to follow and checkboxes to tick that mean they’re doing things right. But reality is much more complex than that, and more complex than you can sum up in a couple of buzzwords or checkboxes.

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.

“Project Conduit (or the ‘Company’) is a leading email certification provider guaranteeing delivery of email for senders (brands) and their distribution or marketing agents,” the pitch letter said. “The Company’s core solution is certified email – an email delivery technology designed to ensure that the email bypasses spam filters and reliably reaches the recipients with links and images intact.”

Ken talked to Goodmail, Return Path and ISIPP. Both Return Path and ISIPP denied being the company referenced. Goodmail, on the other hand, responded to Ken’s inquiry with a short statement.

Several months ago, Goodmail began a large scale industry initiative to leverage on its successful email certification business and its unique enhanced email technology which enables video and interactivity.

While we courted participation in this initiative, we caught the attention of several very large companies. These companies expressed interest that went beyond participation. In response, to help us evaluate this interest and determine whether a transaction is in the best interest of our shareholders, we retained the services of an investment bank.

Ken’s article also discusses the implications of Goodmail no longer in use by Yahoo. Go read the whole article (and sign up).

Ken is really trying to make this report an example of how to do ad supported email newsletters right. When I subscribed yesterday I received the following welcome message:

Please click here to confirm your subscription to The Magill Report.

What You Can Expect

As part of your subscription, you will receive The Magill Report weekly newsletter each Tuesday and possibly one stand-alone ad or survey on Thursdays.

You will receive no more than two e-mails per week from The Magill Report.

And, no, you can’t opt out of the Thursday e-mails and still get The Magill Report. Those Thursday ads are what will be keeping Magill in vodka martinis and cigars.

What You’ll Get in The Magill Report

• Fearless reporting on Internet marketing available nowhere else
• Rare insights from someone with real-world direct-marketing experience
• Regular reports on studies and surveys relevant to your business
• Intelligent, brash and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny analysis
• The real stories behind the PR nonsense regurgitated elsewhere
• Occasionally, even some juicy gossip (Magill loves gossip)
• Authoritative, insightful, how-to and reference information related to getting things done
• The ability to comment and submit content for potential publication
• Occasional references to Magill’s unhealthy relationship with alcohol.

He hit all the high points you should in a welcome message. He told me how frequently I’d hear from him and when, he also included information about future content.

Ken has been reporting on the email marketing industry since very early on and always has an interesting perspective on what’s happening. Go sign up!

Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article, pointing out that the vast majority of things affecting delivery are under the control of the list owner, not under the control of the ESP. As they are both right, I clearly agree with them. I’ve also posted about reputation and delivery regularly.

• Failed Delivery of Permission Based Email
• Fixing high complaint rates and improving reputation
• Reputation as measured by the ISPs
• Reputation
• Reputation: part 2

While some of us agree wholeheartedly with Ken, he did receive comments from a few delivery people indicating they thought that ESPs should talk about how their technology could improve delivery for senders. Having had experience with customers of most (if not all) of the major ESPs, I would argue that most of the ESPs have roughly equivalent technology. Some may have slightly different bells and whistles, but those bells and whistles are not going to improve delivery on their own.

One commenter says, “ESP technology completely varies, and as ISPs increase ‘throttling’, the ESPs that can optimize throughput will have dramatically better deliverability than others.” What’s wrong with this statement? Nothing is wrong on the surface, it makes sense if you don’t know much about delivery and ISP rate limiting. However, in the last 12 – 18 months ISPs have really moved from one rate limit for all senders to dynamic limits based on the reputation and type of mail coming from a particular source.  Throttling at the major ISPs is mostly controlled by  reputation – they are dynamically assigning rate limits based on a senders’ short term and medium term reputation. If your ESP has to implement technology in order to cope with those limits on your behalf then your delivery through that ESP, by definition, has a problem.

Moving to an ESP that can dynamically “adjust” to ISP imposed limits may improve delivery over the short term, but will not do anything to fix the underlying reputation issues that are prompting the ISPs to throttle mail.

Another commenter says, “Some ESPs have better support structure in place than others, whether it’s technology, staff, or approach, to make marketers more successful.” I agree with some of this. Some ESPs do have better techology and staff and will hold marketers hands and help them improve delivery. In most cases, this revolves around actually making the marketers into better senders, teaching them about best practices and even forcing the sender to make changes or find another ESP. Rarely does the actual SMTP technology factor into this improvement.

There are a lot of technical things that ESPs could do to improve delivery, but that many (most?) of them don’t do. Two of the more obvious things ESPs could do technically to facilitate delivery improvements are:

1. Send VALID and w3c compliant HTML mail. This is pretty easy to do with off the shelf or open source technology, but most ESPs don’t do any cleanup of the email format. Invalid HTML will hurt delivery. HTML from a MS Word document pasted into an email creates ugly, uncompliant, messy HTML that looks a whole lot like spam to ISP filters.
2. Use data mining techniques to identify potential problem customers before mail is sent. I know one ESP is doing this very successfully, but most ESPs deal with problems reactively instead of proactively. It is better for everyone concerned if bad mail is caught before it goes out, not after.

Overall, I am a big supporter of ESPs. I think their technology and their policy expertise makes them a good vendor for the average company wanting to use email marketing. I think, though, that delivery and deliverability are under the control of the sender, not the ESP. An ESP that attempts to sell the idea that the technology is more important than practices and policies is misleading both themselves and their customers.