There is a growing subculture emerging in the Email Industry.   This narrow subculture is built around the role of the Email Deliverability consultant.  These email folk heroes often hold “silver bullets” that dramatically alleviate problems caused by poor email deliverability.  Whether it’s resolving sender reputation issues, aligning sectors of your email program to meet legal compliance, or ensuring that all technical considerations are met, these masked magicians with assistants named Tonto can help.

There seems to be a critical knowledge gap that needs to be addressed.  Often the requests to hire an industry “folk hero” (consultant) originate from a marketer who wants to fully optimize the organization’s email program.  Factors that optimize programs include, but are not limited to, list quality and data collection, increased open rates, better ROI tracking, and achieving optimal inbox placement rates.  As much as marketers might want an optimized program, they often do not fully recognize the technology challenges of getting email delivered to achieve these desired results.   When that happens, for certain organizations, it’s time for The Email Deliverability Consultant: Email’s Lone Ranger.

A Marksman who gets his hands Dirty

Depending on the scope of the project, these consultants offer a wide range of deliverability services, including, but not limited to a deep understanding of list quality and data collection, email authentication best practices, setting up FBLs, bounce handling and infrastructure.  Consultants also commonly help with sourcing, installing and configuring optimal specs for both commercial and open source MTAs.  Frequently, the scope of the project grows into in-depth consulting on email engagement, response or retention campaigns or designing strategies that integrate complimentary marketing channels such as mobile platforms and social media.

Masters of Disguise

As we know, consulting by nature is a feast or famine type career.  And often, email deliverability consultants are positioned in precarious situations and exploited by bad actors.  Suspect senders often pump consultants for information on where to find responsive email lists or, even worse, ask about revealing key contacts at Yahoo, or other ISPs.  Deliverability consultants’ clients largely come from referrals and word-of-mouth.  That said, they live by a strict moral code of conduct, because they sometimes face important ethical decisions; at times, they must choose between a paycheck and literally firing a client. 

The Audit Process

The Audit Process is a “state of play” snapshot of the deliverability climate within the organization.

Usually, deliverability consultants will require answers to a set of detailed questions  and an analysis of overall infrastructure (technical setup) before any type of contract is in place.  During the audit, clients may seed consultants on different types of emails (marketing, transactional, etc) where they could begin reporting on items such as blacklist status, reputation, authentication tests, content, and inbox placement rates, etc. Consultants will then try to identify trends within the email list, such as attrition rates, opens, clicks, and sign up rates.   Some feedback is then given to the client, but deliverability consultants generally need to access additional data, such as bounce handling, FBL monitoring, send rates, and identifying email streams.

Contracts

A typical contract is somewhere between 30-90 days, with ongoing support in place.  However, most organizations are likely to add to the scope of services and have other goals in mind beyond deliverability.  These days, organizations that have prevalent stakeholders will go to great lengths to gain an edge over their competitors.  So, in many cases, an ongoing contract can grow out of the original short-term agreement.

The behemoths in our industry are companies like ReturnPath , Pivotal Veracity (Unica) and Goodmail which is widely known for certified inbox placement.  These companies collaborate extensively with established ESPs and large enterprises.  However, below I’ve listed a few other respected industry resources, the majority of which have over a decade of email deliverability experience.   Each has experience with organizations that range in size from ESP startups to F500 corporations.

In their work as Email’s Lone Rangers, these consultants can most often revive a company’s deliverability afflictions, so that key members of the organization can hop back in the saddle without too much damage done to its sender reputation. 

This article was inspired by:

· Jaren Angerbauer, DeliveryVision

· Andrew Bonar,Emailexpert

· Micky Chandler, Whizardries

· Greg Kraios, Den of Deliverability

· Laura and Steve Atkins, Word to the Wise

 

"Hi-yo, Silver, away!"

 

Fred Tabsharani

Port25 Solutions, Inc.

@tabsharani

My friend Morgan Stewart has said it all publicly that either a few of us have thought to ourselves at one time or another or have said out-loud in a secret behind closed door email coalition session. "Why do Email feedback mechanisms ONLY focus on the negative and not ever the positive"?

I couldn't agree more with what Morgan put into his article. Why aren't the email client makers and web email providers interested in improving email to its fullest extent. Yes, Yes, Yes, I know that marketers are only <1% of abuse desk issues while they fight the real battles of spam, bots, phishing, etc, but really how hard can it be to create a button to remove a negative from the reputation score or filter count when some does something right?

I constantly hear at these secret behind closed door email coalition sessions where ISP's or filtering companies give a good ole' pat on the back to those senders who participate in email best practice discussions and ensure their customers are doing the right things, but to me that should also come in the form of something more measurable. It's odd that all I ever hear from the email client makers, web email providers, and email filtering companies is reputation rules when it comes to getting your email delivered properly and that if they see negative measurable compliant's via a spam button you'll surely will be in the dog house, but no one to date seems to support the notation of sending good email will get you back into the bigger house via a not-spam button. Why is it that ISP's, web email providers, and email filtering companies make senders plea their way out of false positive spam issues via a phone call, web forms, or a secret email list on behalf of their customers when the end-users, whom they already listen to about spam issues, should be the ones voting positively about their good experiences in email?

 

Most here know metrics are a good thing for senders to see so they can identify what the issues really are and can correct things on their own without a call or web form. I can also safely say from experience that most senders RARELY call someone/something on the receiver side these days if they have a clear overview in thanks partly to data we can see via negative feedback loops. So why not give a FULLER or more complete picture of how end-users see email? To me and what I read from Morgan here is that we are only seeing half the picture when it comes to metrics. So I agree with Morgan! How can we turn email for the better in 2010?

Good article Morgan!

 -Dennis
Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

(The Deliverability Forum is a series of interviews I hosted with industry leaders and luminaries over the past few months.  It came to closure last week and I have shared the final post with takeaways and highlights from the Bronto blog.)

It is with a bit of ennui that I must close this series.  Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the blog posts over the last few months and gave their uncensored opinions around what they find valuable, in need of change or what interesting developments are in the pipeline.  As we began, so we will end - you may not have direct access to these industry leaders but I hope the conversations I've shared have given you insight into the minds of those who have direct influence over the email industry from a sender's and receiver's perspective.  And thank you for the comments and readership thus far.

If you missed any of the blog posts, they are laid out below in chronological order with a high level summary of the post and my takeaways for you as a reader to glean from the interview.  Also, I've included a "definition" section at the bottom of this post if there are any acronyms that you might be uncertain about.  Please scroll down to access it.

The Players:

The FTC (post) describes in the US government's own voice how spam is regulated and counteracted.  Ethan Arenson, the FTC Spam Coordinator, spells out the very serious consequences of not being CAN-SPAM compliant and where to go for their exacting interpretation of what exactly is required of all commercial mailers.  It also shows the government's willingness to help curb the problem of unwanted email by enforcing industry standards such as authentication in a non-legal but best standard way.

My take: While most commercial emailers are compliant with the law (especially if using an ESP such as Bronto), it remains in your best interest to stay cognizant of the law and have someone you trust and can defer to when you're not sure if what you're doing is legal.  Also, the FTC regularly updates the Act's provisions so make sure to stay abreast of the latest rules that are voted in by the FTC commissioners.  We are talking about law here with real civil and criminal consequences if broken.  You don't want to find yourself being accused of a federal crime wherein ignorance of the law won't hold much water!

Pivotal Veracity's (post) President and CEO, Deidre Baird, explains the importance of both authentication and user engagement.  Pivotal Veracity is neither an ISP nor an ESP, but rather a deliverability intermediary services company with deep expertise around content and email disposition.  Also, Pivotal Veracity is a partner of Bronto.  As the interview mentions, without a conscious eye towards the emerging shift in ISP deliverability patterns, specifically around user engagement and authentication, you'll find your program in trouble.

My take: As AOL puts it, "send relevant email to people that want to receive it!"  Are you doing everything you can from an infrastructure standpoint to ensure your email doesn't attract negative hits when being scanned and determined for acceptance by the ISPs?  And, once delivered, is the email being received well by your recipients?  If you can't categorically answer in the affirmative to both of those questions, you have some major homework to do or else risk your mail being deemed irrelevant and sent off to the bulk folder or bounced back.  Both cost money.

Razorfish (post) chimed in from a email content and strategy perspective.  Whitney Hutchinson, Group Director, Strategy and Account Services, sums it up nicely by hitting on these key points: engage your recipients with appropriate creatives, have a holistic marketing approach for the relationship management and take into account the "stacking effect" which is a result of the newly emergent communication technologies available to market to recipients through.  Email is now one of many.

My take: While email is now just one piece in a wide breadth of technologies (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Wave, SMS, etc.), it is still the most important and most trusted conduit of content that recipients most engage with consistently over time.  It has proven itself as a reliable protocol, even older than the internet itself (history)!  But, recipients have become increasingly savvy with its adoption so making your content stand out amongst the sea of email users get is at the vanguard of a successful marketing program.

ReturnPath's (post) President, George Bilbrey, still believes email is the "killer" app.  ReturnPath, while not an email sender or receiver, hosts a suite of services ranging from ESP to ISP products and plays a significant role with its liaison relationship between both senders and receivers.  He poignantly breaks down the exacting metrics ISPs use to measure user engagement (i.e., open rates, click rates, spam complaints, panel votes, etc.) along with the idea of domain reputation.  ReturnPath is a partner of Bronto.

My take: Authenticate, watch your complaints and make sure your domain reputation is healthy.  Yahoo! and AOL have already moved over to using domain reputation as a determining factor for deliverability - so to even ignore those two at this point with their combined estimated 142.4 million unique inboxes is perilous.  ISPs are fighting off spam and user interpreted unwanted email; don't let your mail take on these smarmy characteristics.

Cloudmark (post) occupies a very distinct space in the email industry as being a provider of anti-phishing, spamming, virus and other threat vector services to ISPs only.  Jamie Tomasello, Abuse Operations Manager, posits that authentication doesn't actually imply good mail but rather mail that is verified as coming from the declared source.  Interestingly, she adds that user engagement is not a net positive measurement - you can have negative user engagement as well depending on what the user does with your mail that is perceived by the ISPs and companies such as hers when it's not wanted.  Permission is tantamount.

My take: Bronto and many other responsible ESPs require permission based marketing as the only source of email addresses senders can email to.  Why?  Because it shows the true intent of the recipient to actually want your email; they've taken an action that is clear and deliberate to let the sender know they want the email.  By assuming recipient desire and emailing recipients who haven't given permission is casting a large net that will cause deliverability issues.  Think about it.  When was the last time you marked an email as spam or deleted it when you didn't knowingly sign up for it?  That's what I thought.

LashBack (post) rounded up the series as the final contributor with James O’Brien, Director of Marketing.  LashBack is dedicated to monitoring unsubscribe requests, suppression list abuse and whether an unsubscribe mechanism exists.  This directly ties into CAN-SPAM compliancy as well as being inline with email marketing best practices - when a recipient communicates to you they don't want your email anymore, you should honor this request without question or judgment.  Also, LashBack is putting together the first Email Compliance Summit which should be highly anticipated by senders and ESPs who want to stay on the cutting edge of unsubscribe policy.

My take: With the unsubscribe mechanism being one of several ways a recipient can directly and easily communicate intent with the email sender (others being complaints lodged with the respective ISP or direct email to the sender's role accounts), it is a very useful metric to measure the impact your mail is having on recipients.  Are you sending too much?  Too frequently?  Not targeted enough?  It's the job of the marketer to find that sweet spot where relevancy, recency and frequency are met with the recipients to not drive them to unsubscribe from your mail.

Definitions:

• CAN-SPAM: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003 is the law the federal US government enacted to combat spam and other unwanted and malicious email.

• FTC: Federal Trade Commission is the arm of the federal government in charge of enforcing and maintaining the CAN-SPAM Act.

• ISP: Internet Service Provider of which the largest B2C ISPs are Yahoo!, Hotmail/Live, Gmail and AOL.  Email provider or receiver.

• ESP:  Email Service Provider such as Bronto.  Email senders.

• SPF: Sender Policy Framework is a type of email authentication that is path based and validates the sending entity.

• DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail is a type of email authentication that is encryption based, validates the content of a message hasn't been tampered with while in transit and can be tied back to a sending domain.

I hope that the Deliverability Forum and this wrap up have helped you with your deliverability programs.  Still have questions?  Comment below and let's keep the conversation going.

Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability at Bronto
@ChrisAWheeler

Mark Brownlow posted a great series on the future of deliverability at his site Email Marketing Reports.
He started off with getting some well known deliverability experts in the industry together (and I am humbled to have been one of them), got our thoughts and opinions on certain topics ranging from authentication to recipient engagement to spam complaints.  And then, he put it all together in a nice chronological series coming out with a new post every week or so giving you time to digest the previous one.

This is a fantastic tool and resource for folks who aren't as savvy in email deliverability as they'd like to be.  Or, for those who just need a primer to brush up on their skills and knowledge.  As we all know, one of the things that keeps the world of email deliverability so fun and exciting is the ever changing landscape while everyone from senders to receivers tries to figure out what to do next.  We're still pioneering email, folks.  There's a lot of uncharted territory out there just waiting to be discovered.  So, without further adieu, I give you Mr. Brownlow's series broken down by post and topic.

• Future of deliverability: 1. The role of user interaction (click)
• Future of deliverability: 2. The role of authentication (click)
• Future of deliverability: 3. The role of domain reputation (click)
• Future of deliverability: 4. The role of certification (click)
• Future of deliverability: 5. Sender reputation and B2B email marketing (click)
• 192 email deliverability resources (click)

I would especially make sure you have that last link bookmarked as it's chalk full of places to go and people to reach out to if you find yourself in need of further help around deliverability.

Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability at Bronto
@ChrisAWheeler

Reposted from the Bronto Blog.

By now, most email marketers have probably come to understand that sending email is not without risk.  As with any marketing, knowing your audience and serving up something that will entice them to convert is key.  Two methods email recipients have to let you, as a marketer, know they don't like what you've sent them is by either unsubscribing or lodging a complaint with their ISP (largest still is Yahoo! with 106MM unique US inboxes according to the latest report).

Note, these are not representative of recipients (your potential or existing customers) telling you they don't care or are indifferent to what you've sent them.  But, rather, they've gone out of their way to deliberately tell someone they don't appreciate the email (either you, directly via the unsubscribe or the ISP via a complaint).

Let's dive into the complaints a bit more, though.  These little bits of data a recipient fires off to their ISP or 3rd party service (like SpamCop) have two effects:

1. It signifies to the ISP that a subscriber of theirs has identified what she considers to be spam.  When these are added up over time and the recipient base, that ISP domain can begin blocking the sender.
2. It is compiled in the email platform you're using and usually, like with Bronto's Sender Rating, can impact your ability to send email out.  Also, that recipient is unsubscribed from future mailings until they re-optin.

At its core, a spam complaint is a person raising their hand and saying "Yuck."

How do you measure complaints? Based on the above effects, there's real money being left on the table after every complaint is lodged.  It not only affects the LTV (define) but also shows the value of your program as determined by the aggregate of the recipients' reactions.

Start Simple. If you don't yet have a way to assign a monetary value to a complaint, take it slow.  Look at your marketing spreadsheets or your data warehouse (or wherever you keep the incremental value listed per customer/prospect, even if it's on a legal pad somewhere) and ask yourself "How much will it cost me when one person tells me they don't want any more email?"  Is it $10?  $5?  If you have really high incremental revenue per item, it may be more.  If you're about providing a more informational email, it will be much lower.  But at some point, you need to define how many net dollars will come out of your budget each time a new recipient tells you "No!"

Stay consistent. Once you've got the value down, be sure to apply it to all recipients across the board fairly.  You can break down the values per mailing segment, but in my experience, it's more effective to have the opportunity cost assigned multilaterally.  Makes it much easier to compare one campaign to the next within your campaign.

Be true to yourself. The whole point of email marketing in the first place is to spread the word about your company, service or product, right?  Pay attention to complaints coming in (of which any good email platform should expose) and act on this information.  Turning a blind eye or accepting the complaints as collateral damage for emailing will result in potentially alienating your recipients.  And, with that individual, you'll lose their willingness in the future to even get your email.

Don't be afraid of complaints; embrace them.  The spam complaint isn't going anywhere soon.  Many ISPs still use it at as the glue tying senders to email performance, recipients are being trained more and more to just "spam it" from their own web or thick clients, and successful marketers know exactly how much a complaint drives out of their potential success in dollars.  Take action when receiving them and use your marketing savvy to avoid more in the future.

I'll leave you with this thought...

39% of all respondents said they used the "report spam" button often or very often. - MarketingSherpa "Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008"

Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability at Bronto
@ChrisAWheeler

I joined Genius.com a few months ago as a member of their Deliverability and Anti-Abuse team. My focus is on deliverability and managing the email servers. Genius has a great application that gets marketers and sales people working together. The Genius application relies heavily on emails being sent to the right people at the right time.

In addition to email deliverability, I have a background in system admin, programming (among other nerdy pursuits) and I am active in the technical (and sometimes political) Internet community which helps me in the world of deliverability . I look forward to sharing my experience with you over the coming weeks.

The world of DKIM: Domain Keys Identified Mail.

One of the challenges in identifying suspicious email is knowing reliably where it came from. With email coming from a wide variety of machines, it’s possible that a machine has been compromised and a malicious sender is spoofing mail headers, injecting false headers and essentially misrepresenting a third party. A lot of spam is generated by compromised machines which are part of botnets, networks of thousands (even millions) of remotely controlled machines. Some of these machines can be even legitimate mail servers, some can send email via ISP or ESP mail servers (ISP: Internet Service Provider, ESP: Email service provider). How do we know who is who? Who should we complain to? Some services like spamcop.net, try to analyse emails headers and figure out who was responsible for sending the email but they often also target whoever is managing the networks used to relay the emails. They aim wide, to ensure they will alert someone that will care and fix the spam source.

Would it not be easier to know who is sending emails?

There are some old techniques like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and S/MIME but they are heavy to implement because they require the cooperation of all of the users. Besides, we often do not need to authenticate the emails, but have a way to validate where the email is coming from. That is, to identify which system administrator configured the mail server that sent the email. This is the person we want to talk to for any problem. Hopefully he/she is a little bit more clued than the user who sent the email and can take remedial methods. Fixing problems on the Internet involves often finding the person that understands what you want and knows what action to take. End users are rarely in this category, but systems and network administrators are.

Several industry groups tried to solve this problem, the two main technologies that emerged were DomainKeys and Sender Policy Framework (SPF).

Ideally, emerging technologies will evolve to become standards. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) does not generally create new Internet technologies, but they are very good at taking something that a group submits for standardization and making it rock solid because the peer review is strong. This has been the case for example for http (the web protocol), ssl/tls (securing connections between applications) and many others.

They did the same thing with DomainKeys and SPF and issued the DKIM specification. DKIM is now in the Internet Standard track of the IETF. It means if you like it you have a fixed specification you can follow that will work with various and disparate systems. It really become a de-facto standard when a large group implements it.

The main problem with SPF (and a bit with the Sender-ID upgrade) is that emails move from machines to machines before reaching the final destination. In many cases there are only two mail servers involved. The sender and the receiver. SPF inserts a header that tells if you check this domain, it will tell you that this IP address (of the sender) is authorised to send emails for this domain. But if you add a mail relay server, the whole scheme falls flat, as the receiver will have the ip of the mail relay not of the original server. On the other hand DomainKeys has another problem, it can only validate headers that contains the same domain name as the signature. So for instance you can relay a signed message but you cannot sign a message that you relay (like for a mailing list).

DKIM solves all these issues.

At the moment the DKIM Working Group at the IETF is working on specifying a standard for defining policies for the use of DKIM. But first you noticed, I did not say that DKIM authenticates an email, as it is not true. It just validates some headers. It is up to the receiver to process the email based on the successful validation of certain headers and deliver it to your inbox, junk folder, etc. DKIM allows a mail admin (or rather a mail server) to take responsibility for sending/forwarding an email and let other servers know.

This is convenient for instance, to build reputation based on who takes responsibility for sending/forwarding the email. For instance AOL has announced that they will move from IP based reputation to Domain based reputation using DKIM. Similarly, Yahoo provides a feedback loop based on the domain validating the email using DKIM. It does not matter which IP the email comes from.

But what are DKIM policies?

For instance, e-Bay and Google have announced that all the e-Bay emails will be DKIM validated and that Google will use this information to trash any email supposedly from e-Bay which is not DKIM validated. Imagine if all the banks were following this policy. It would seriously reduce the amount of phishing.

Third party validation.

I spoke earlier, that a relay mail server can validate an email. For instance in the case of mailing lists. The mailing list software receives an email, and decides to use its reputation to forward the email to all the subscribers. It can do a third party validation on an email it is forwarding. There is no requirement that any headers in the email (From, Sender, …) contain the same domain name as the domain name of the mailing list. This opens other possibilities. Let's take the bank example, instead of each bank having their own DKIM validation, they could also have a validation done by a bank confederation, authority or regulator (third party). This would add another level of reputation on the email (while they can still add their own DKIM validation to the email).

Genius is providing third party validation on all our customers’ emails. We are taking responsibility for the emails we send on behalf of our customers by ensuring they are DKIM authenticated. There is no silver bullet in ensuring a high rate of email deliverability and DKIM is just one of the layers that help deliverability from a technical perspective. The Genius Email Deliverability and Abuse team in addition to DKIM ensures high rates of deliverability through close and proactive management of its customers email campaigns, education and best practices.

PS: feel free to contact me with comments and suggestions and email delivery related topics you'd be interested in learning more about.

We are constantly astonished by the number of email senders who are not taking advantage of one of the greatest free resources out there - feedback loops from the ISPs.

In fact, we require all of our email deliverability accreditation customers to sign up for all of the feedback loops out there, which include feedback loops from AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Comcast, and RoadRunner, just to name a few.

Feedback loops allow you to receive notice - usually in real time - any time one of the ISP's users hits "this is spam" on an email which originated from one of your IP addresses.

Now, let's face it, this isn't rocket science - the more spam complaints you get at a given ISP, the more likely it is that your email is going to end up in the junk folder at that ISP.  And if you don't address the situation,  you may even end up blocked there.  Staying on top of user complaints as they happen through feedback loops is the first step to heading these problems off at the pass.

Put another way, by monitoring your own spam complaints you quite literally have your finger on the pulse of your email's health at that ISP.  Through the ISP's feedback loop, you get a copy of every 'this is spam' complaint that the ISP gets from their users about your email.   Most ISPs sanitize their feedback loops by removing the email address of the user who complained before sending the complaint on to you, so unless you are including a unique, user-specific token in each email (always a good idea) you won't know who actually complained.  However, even without knowing who complained, having copies of those complaints is very useful.  For example, most ISPs have a complaint threshold above which they will start throwing your email into the junk folder instead of the inbox, so you want to keep your spam complaints well below that threshold.  

And beyond the email deliverability aspect, if a substantial number of users are complaining about your email, that means that your email probably isn't making the impact that you are hoping that it will!

Once you start receiving your feedback loops, you can garner all sorts of interesting - and useful - information from them by aggregating and analyzing them.  For example, the Feedback Loop Reports service that we offer tells our senders how many complaints they received for the day at each ISP;  the number of complaints per "From" address;  the number of complaints per sending IP address; and the unique ID of each email which generated a complaint.  All things you would expect.  But, it also tells our senders how many complaints they received for each subject line!  Imagine being able to fine tune the first thing that your users see - the subject line - based on real time feedback!  It's all there in the feedback loops - which are free for the asking - if you just look.

So, if you aren't already signed up for all the feedback loops you can eat, you are missing out on a valuable resource, containing vital information, for your own email deliverability.  And whether you choose to outsource it, or roll your own, you should definitely be analyzing the information available to you in those ISP feedback loops.   The health of your email deliverability depends on it.

This is going to sound bad for me, but does anyone remember getting that one BAD report card that just called you out to your parents about how "good" your doing in school? Well, AOL is about to do the same thing as well.

Previously, Report Cards were sent to any domain generating in excess of 0.1% inbox complaints

http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2008/11/25/change-to-the-report-card-process/

In this post, AOL is letting us know that they will begin to send out a report card to those senders who's complaint levels are in excess of 0.3% inbox complaints. 0.1% is still the target for a bulk mailer, AOL does not feel it is necessary to alert mailers of a potential problem until they have reached 0.3%. Think of this as a progress report before the report card in school

http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2008/12/10/change-to-the-report-card-process-part-deux/

This post takes it one step further to the principles office. They will be  sending a different report card to domains generating an excess of 1.0% inbox complaints on a given day!

How do you get these? Sign-Up for a Feedback loop at AOL

-Dennis

Eloqua

Don't Just Send, Deliver!

P.S. Yes, Christine really looks like that...

We got informed by one of our customers that he got removed from his own newsletter and our logs stated that the reason was the feedback loop. We’ve begun to analyze the content of the complaints and it has turned out that Yahoo had started to a add couple of headers to their messages.

Here’s a sample:

X-IP-SENDER: 98.136.44.45
Received: from [216.252.122.216] by n77.bullet.mail.sp1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 27 Oct 2008 03:48:09 -0000
Received: from [69.147.65.166] by t1.bullet.sp1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 27 Oct 2008 03:48:09 -0000
Received: from [127.0.0.1] by omp501.mail.sp1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 27 Oct 2008 03:48:09 -0000
X-Yahoo-Newman-Property: ymail-5
X-Yahoo-Newman-Id: 939505.70691.bm@omp501.mail.sp1.yahoo.com
Received: (qmail 63926 invoked by uid 60001); 27 Oct 2008 03:48:09 -0000
Message-ID: <20081027034809.63924.qmail@web46108.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
X-YahooUserId: REDACTED
X-YahooUserIP: 124.13.176.52
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:48:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: yahoo mail bot
Subject: NOTSPAM: Top Dog Trading Video #2
To: notspam@mailservices.yahoo.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

The Subject and To fields are most interesting. The Subject has the original message’s subject prefixed with “NOTSPAM:”. The To field seems to match the subject. After noticing this we started to browse different complaints. It turned out that after since October 25th the majority of Yahoo complaints has those new headers present.

Except the notspam@mailservices.yahoo.com address we found out that some of the complaints had the To set to possiblespam@mailservices.yahoo.com.

The notspam@mailservices.yahoo.com email address was added in the To field only between October 25th and October 30th. We have checked this across multiple servers. We still see some amount of the possiblespam@mailservices.yahoo.com in the To field and it seems to be the new standard as the number of messages with the old header-less format is minimal.

The question this brings up is whether Yahoo hasn’t sent us the data of people that were clicking “This is NOT spam” and instead of removing those email addresses from the list we should restore them as they were actually good subscribers. I’m talking about the interval between October 25th and October 30th.

Some of our customers and industry specialists reported that there was a drop in the average number of complaints coming from Yahoo’s feedback loops at the end of October. After a couple of days things went back to normal. Maybe this has also something to do with this. Obviously they were making some substantial changes in their system.

I just wouldn’t like if our customers lost some good subscribers because of this.

Has anyone noticed similar behavior and got similar reports from your customers? It would be great if the Yahoo team could make an official statement for sender’s, so we would know how to react.

BTW: It would be a great to see, who clicked “not spam” – this is a clear indicator that emails ARE wanted, no just the ones that are not

Yahoo kept their word.

We have posted a Yahoo FBL request for our customer
on Monday and the FBL was granted the same day!

A wonderful news for all marketers that have setup
new services after the Yahoo FBL was taken down.

Apply slowly not to swamp the Yahoo team.
They surely are busy guys.

Keep up the great work Yahoo!

BlueTie is beta testing the Return Path feedback loop for the domains it hosts including excite.com, iwon.com, and myway.com. Right now its only open to Return Path customers but it should open up to the public sometime soon.