Everyone knows that the way to get a real read on your email deliverability is to put seed addresses in the list and then check if they really arrive at the Inbox or the Spam folder. Because spam filtering is different at each ISP, you need to have seeds at Gmail, seeds at Hotmail, seeds at Yahoo, and many other places. Traditionally this has worked pretty well and there are a few commercial solutions available in the marketplace from Return Path, Pivotal Veracity, Lyris, and others.
Things aren’t so simple though. Spam filters are getting more personalized, learning about what individual users consider spam or not. Messages are being removed from the Inbox after they are delivered. These and other factors cause the seed accounts to behave differently than the average user.
Gmail’s Priority Inbox will only make this worse. It’s completely personalized, learning what you think is most important based on who you contact most frequently and which emails you open. Now you don’t just need to worry about the spam folder, you also want to get into the Prioritized Inbox. You can’t measure this with traditional seeding, you need a way to sample the behavior of real users.
At first, this will be most relevant to the large ISPs who have cutting edge spam filtering. It will probably be many years before regional ISPs have this functionality. But the top four ISPs make up more than half of most email lists, so this is an issue that will be hard to ignore for long.
Here is the official Gmail video describing the new prioritized Inbox.
Last 5 posts by Joshua Baer
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Josh,
It depends on what you think seeds are for.
Seeds will continue to do a good job in determining whether or not messages are making into the inbox at Gmail. What they aren’t doing is determining what happens to the message once they make it into the inbox – are they being prioritized or not on an individualized basis. They give the a view of what happens to the message once it makes it into the inbox with a default settings (and little client interaction)
In addition, seeds will continue to an important method for measuring delivery rates going forward since only the big webmail providers will have access to user level data – It’s unlikely that cable MSOs will have this type of technology soon.
As an added bonus for RP, this kind of user level filtering present and opportunity for certification programs (stay tuned).