It is a sad reality that there are unscrupulous folks who send spam and phishing emails. Some of the most authentic looking and most dangerous spam messages I have seen in my inbox have been from phishers trying to replicate financial services emails. These fake emails usually notify me that my account has been frozen and then encourage me to click on a link or to reply with personal information.

Recently I received a legitimate and noteworthy series of emails from Bank of America. Their first email introduced updates to their alert emails so that their customers could expect what to look for. The new features include a new look, personalization, a security checkpoint, alert information and more. I am sure Bank of America has been dealing with spoofed emails for some time now, so hopefully these changes will reduce security headaches and help stop the spammers.

The first educational email from Bank of America draws attention to the forthcoming  changes:

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Microsoft has recently announced enhancements to its Windows Live Hotmail, including features that “help busy people with full lives.” The CheetahMail deliverability team has reviewed these new features and offers these thoughts on their potential impact on senders.

Some of the new features that should have a positive impact on email deliverability include:

• Trusted Senders Icon — Hotmail will now help visually identify ‘trusted senders’ in your inbox, particularly banks and other senders most commonly impersonated in phishing scams, by putting safety logos next to those senders recognized as legitimate. While the exact details on this feature are limited right now, it will most likely be based on a combination of authentication and a consistently positive mailing reputation.
• Tabs — Organizational tools will appear at the top of the inbox that will allow the user to display messages received from specific contacts, certain social networks (such as Facebook notifications), pre-selected email groups, or all of their mail. In addition, “Quick Views” will be available that will automatically sort four types of emails into their respective folders: Flagged, Photos, Office Docs, and Shipping Updates. These tabs can benefit senders by addressing inbox overload issues.

One of the new features that should have a negative impact on senders and deliverability as a whole:

• Time Traveling Filters — Microsoft’s filters can retroactively remove messages that were placed in the inbox if the reputation of the sender later turns out to be poor and the recipient has not yet opened the message in their inbox. That means there’s no longer a guarantee that a message delivered to the inbox will actually stay there until the recipient acts on it.

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In my last blog post, I spoke about ‘mostly dead’ email recipients who are closely monitored as an anti-spam measure because their accounts are being neglected. Not only do ISPs investigate these accounts, but Microsoft just announced they’re suing an emailer for deceptively creating accounts with the intent to game their anti-spam filter. Clearly this is not something that legitimate senders would do, but it does relate to a question I get on occasion; should we tell our recipients, friends, family and co-workers to help us get out of the spam folder by clicking the ‘not spam’ button?

The short answer to the question is yes, this can be helpful. But the reality is it will only work if:

1. You’re not trying to get around a genuine reputation problem.
2. You’re really popular.
3. The response activity is genuine.

Companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! spend millions of dollars and labor resources fighting search engine click fraud. The fraud scenario is no different with email when users click ‘not spam’ using dormant or otherwise fake accounts. As a result, be mindful that these and other email providers can tell the difference between genuine user responses and an attempt to game their system, as Microsoft is showing with their latest lawsuit.

Here are some recommendations to engage recipients to legitimately help regain inbox standing: Read More »

Recently, our strategic services team presented a webinar on re-engaging inactive users. In that discussion, they focused on the tremendous ROI benefits from focusing on users who aren’t regularly engaging with your email. During the webinar, the speakers spoke about testing mailing frequencies for your less engaged segments. They did not suggest suppressing inactive subscribers entirely. From a deliverability perspective this is an important detail for mailers looking to maintain long term list health to consider. There are three categories of ‘inactive’ subscribers that apply to deliverability and sender reputation:

• De-activated users: Every ISP and webmail provider handles de-activations differently, and most don’t publish their user activity requirements. Some providers such as Microsoft have publicly stated that they use old, recycled, addresses to identify potential spammers. Of course, defunct addresses will bounce. A smaller percentage of addresses that are not regularly mailed risk hitting these formerly active, but now converted to ‘spamtrap’ addresses, with subsequent mailings. The key to avoiding this situation is to never let an inactive email segment or other email list sit for longer than 6 months. Ideally, all addresses should be mailed at least once per quarter to ensure continued activity.
• “Mostly dead” users: One of my favorite movies is the Princess Bride, especially the scene with Billy Crystal as Miracle Max where he says “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.” Some ISPs and webmail providers will start the de-activation process, yet still enable successful email deliveries. Yahoo! publicly states that accounts are de-activated after 4 months of inactivity, but gives users a grace period to come back and re-activate their accounts. AOL and other ISPs have confirmed that they closely look at these types of accounts to identify potential spam activity since spammers will regularly create these accounts to mitigate their overall complaint rates directed to other users at the same ISP. These mailboxes will not generate a hard bounce error code — as would normally result from users who reach their storage limits (mailbox full), unknown users or unavailable users (resulting in bounce error MAILER DAEMON). It’s hard to distinguish these three types of subscribers, which is why it’s important to implement proactive marketing campaigns to target those subscribers on the brink of lapsing.

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For many years, the public impression of how email deliverability works has been shrouded in mystery. Most seem to assume that email service providers hire deliverability experts because they know some sort of ISP black magic — or even better, that they have a direct ‘Bat-Phone’ to call ISP postmasters whenever a problem arises. While ISP relations are still critical to ensuring high delivery rates, the days of relying solely on ISP phone calls or emails to fix delivery problems are a thing of the past.

It’s important to note these key issues about ISP postmasters:

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Here at Experian CheetahMail, we allocate multiple dedicated IP addresses to each of our clients. We do this primarily so that we can send email faster, especially during the holidays. A secondary benefit of this approach is that if an ISP blocks/filters one IP address, it does not impact the other IP addresses sending email.

But now that filtering technologies have now moved beyond IP address reputation to domain-based reputation, it is critical to understand how this shift fundamentally changes how email is filtered by ISPs.

• The good news: For most senders, this change will actually benefit their delivery rates. The fact remains that ISP filters still have ‘false positive’ situations where an individual IP address is singled out due to insufficient data or a glitch in the system, while the same sender’s other IP addresses are highly reputable and reach the inbox. With domain-based reputation, the filter looks at all of the data associated with the domain — therefore the singled-out IP address is overshadowed by the other approved IP addresses. In addition, domain-based filtering incorporates the reputation associated with transactional email sent from the same domain, which will most certainly help overall sender reputation.
• The bad news: If there truly is a reputation problem from anywhere within a sender’s domain, it will effect most (if not all) of the mail coming from that sender. This means that senders must be mindful of their complaint rates and email acquisition efforts because they both will affect their domain-based reputation — and by extension, their ROI. Equally important, if a sender is using the same domain for transactional messaging, those emails may also see their deliverability rates decline.

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Nowadays, many email marketers fill the pre-header area of their emails with “click to view” and message summary information that occupies the prime viewing areas of their messages. Due to this congestion at the top of messages, some companies have begun omitting whitelisting instructions due to a lack of available real estate within the pre-header area of their emails.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term whitelisting, it refers to the process of adding an email address to a list of contacts that the user deems are acceptable to receive email from. This prevents approved email marketing messages from being delivered to the trash or spam folders. Frequently, whitelisting text is phrased in the following manner: “To ensure delivery to your inbox, please add email@company.com to your address book.”

To determine whether including whitelisting instructions in the pre-header area of emails added value to their email program, Origins Natural Resources recently teamed up with Experian CheetahMail to test the effects of including whitelisting instructions in their email template for new subscribers.

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