Google recently announced plans to enhance Gmail by introducing a ‘Priority Inbox’ which will soon be rolling out to its estimated 200mm global users. Experian CheetahMail’s deliverability team has received many inquiries about the new interface, what it may mean for our clients, and how it could affect deliverability.

From a deliverability perspective, this feature once again proves that building a good sender reputation that includes regular customer engagement is of the utmost importance. If users are consistently marking your mail with increased priority, then the sender’s reputation will likely improve. If users are consistently marking mail with decreased priority, the sender’s reputation will likely degrade. While the importance of these new priority settings are mainly user-specific, if too many people push the ‘less important’ button, then Gmail’s algorithm will take this into account and may push those senders email into the “Everything else” section or possibly into the Spam folder.

How Priority Inbox works:

Priority Inbox analyzes incoming mail, giving it a ranking and sorting it into four customizable sections: “Important and unread” (or just “Important”), “Starred” and “Everything else.” “Important” messages are intended to be the most relevant or relationship-oriented, and sit at the top of the screen. Next is the “Starred” section which are messages the user manually flags or sets up as a recurring indication of importance. “Everything else” includes those messages that may not be from an established contact or regularly engaged with before.

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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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The idea of behavioral data affecting email sender reputation first surfaced three years ago, when AOL announced that dormant addresses would factor into sender reputation. AOL explained at the time that spammers create significant numbers of fake email addresses for the sole purpose of driving down complaint percentage rates. Even so, they said that this metric should never affect legitimate emailers who have genuine (human) email recipients.

The next phase of this concept was presented by Microsoft at the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance Conference in 2008 (PDF). Microsoft’s Anti-Spam General Manager indicated that in the future they would prefer to use recipient behavioral metrics like open-rates in addition to their other spam-related metrics to determine sender reputation. While the idea was still hypothetical at the time, the mere fact that they made these statements to a room full of email senders was worth noting.

Now, we have confirmation from Yahoo! that some of these same metrics that AOL and Microsoft have considered are now implemented into Yahoo!’s anti-spam reputation processes. Of course, we’ll never know exactly what percentage of non-openers or other behavioral factors will impact deliverability, but we can say with certainty that dormant addresses and inactive users are now playing a role in determining your Yahoo! inbox success.

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