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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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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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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