At Experian CheetahMail, this Graymail announcement has left many of our clients asking how this change will affect their messages and more importantly their deliverability/Inbox performance. These enhancements go along with what CheetahMail Deliverability has always advised about mailing to your actives. Basically any mail that is sitting in a users’ Hotmail inbox untouched (not opened or clicked) after a while is considered Graymail. Hotmail is trying to reduce the burden of all sorts of offers, newsletters etc for the user and their own system.

We don’t have much insight into their filter algorithms but we can assume if too many people are allowing the clients emails to sit in their inboxes and end up as graymail, Hotmail’s filter will pick this up and can possibly start sending the emails to bulk. We have often seen a decrease in user engagement as a reason for Hotmail bulking. By mailing to your active and engaged Hotmail users this Graymail issue should become a non-issue. Additionally, consider asking users to add the client to their address book to ensure inbox delivery and avoid spam/junk foldering. Instructions can be found here: http://www.cheetahmail.com/deliverability/reach-the-inbox/

The two main features of Graymail that we DO know are:

One-click Unsubscribe

Hotmail has had an unsubscribe link in the user interface already, but how they handle these requests are changing and not complying could result in your email being sent to the spam folder. If a subscriber clicks on the unsubscribe link in the Hotmail interface now, and either the list-unsubscribe header isn’t present or doesn’t work, email from that sender will be permanently delivered to the spam folder. CheetahMail complies with this unsubscribe request.

Schedule Cleanup

Hotmail users can now decide how long they want messages from a particular sender, or all senders, in their inbox before they are deleted permanently or moved to a specified folder. This could be the best time to reach out to your subscribers and give them a choice to the frequency of emails they want to receive. This cleanup could also prove to be beneficial for senders as subscribers may not mark old, unwanted email as spam which can adversely drive up spam complaints.

• Now is the time to emphasize the “please add us to your address book” requests and instructions during the email registration process and in welcome emails. Not only will you get added to user whitelists which overrides ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ folder delivery, but also recipient response rates should be better, as well as brand perception, because images are displayed by default. A new trend for marketers is to consider sending a dedicated message solely to drive address book adoption in advance of the holidays. For example, “We are going to have some fantastic deals during the holidays. Add us to your address book to make sure you don’t miss them.” In light of the recent Facebook ‘Messages’ announcement, it is also now important to use such a dedicated email to request users become a ‘fan’ or ‘like’ your content.  [See example below]
• If you have a group of recipients who haven’t been mailed in a long time, before mailing them all at once, consider testing small segments to gauge complaint and bounce rates and make creative and segmentation adjustments with subsequent campaigns to ensure these metrics don’t become a risk to your overall messaging reputation.
• It is critical to maintain the same ‘from’ addresses and formulate subject lines that highlight the email’s ‘call-to-action’ and is not too ‘cheeky’ that it could be confusing or misleading to recipients where it may lead to user complaints.

In 2009, holiday email volume rose, increasing over  26% from the 2008 holiday season. We can predict this trend to continue for the 2010 holiday season meaning the ISPs will be working in overdrive to ensure all relevant and legitimate email is delivered into the Inbox while keeping out the large amount of true spam. Following these holiday best practices, and others such as maintaining ‘engaged’ users will help keep your clients’ IP reputation strong, your Inbox delivery rates high, your targeted customers happy and ultimately your revenue numbers up.

Here’s a personal story about why it doesn’t make a lot of sense to bounce remove after the first attempt.

I purchased my personal domain name in 1998 and have used it for select personal email relationships ever since. I had a problem with my domain registrar a couple years ago that involved them accidentally expiring my domain without notifying me. It then took weeks to get it fixed. In the meantime, all personal email to me hard bounced. Some of my most important contacts reached out to me through other channels, a few even sending snail mail informing me of the bounced email.

While this situation is rare, it is just one of many reasons why emails hard bounce and yet will be valid once again in short order.

In the past, ISPs used to focus on hard bounces as a critical anti-spam metric. With today’s sophisticated filters focused primarily on complaints and other data, very few ISPs see a reasonable (<5%) hard bounce rate as an indicator of spam as long as the other performance metrics are also in line with legitimate email.

Some additional tips when considering bounce removal rules:

1. Every ISP is different, therefore a liberal bounce rule at less sophisticated ISPs (like those without real-time complaint data) could result in deliverability problems.
2. Re-mailing bounces again is not the same as ‘re-trying’ a message. If the address is invalid now, it likely won’t be valid again the same day or even a few days from now. Wait a week or more before re-mailing that user.
3. Never re-mail bounces more than a few months old. Some ISPs turn bad data into spamtraps, which are used as an anti-spam filter. In some cases, ISPs will share defunct addresses with 3^rd party blocklists like Spamhaus. In other cases, an ISP may recycle that address to another user.
4. If the relationship is really important (or if you have the resources), consider a personalized snail mail effort following a bounce. I was pleasantly surprised about the letters from my commercial relationships and valued those relationships even more as a result.

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.

Gmail will automatically determine which of your messages are ‘Important’ based on their algorithms and a few other aspects, including:

• Who sent the email. For example, if you email Bob a lot, it’s likely that messages from Bob are important.
• What keyword terms it includes. If you always read messages about soccer, a new message that contains those same soccer words is more likely to be important.
• Other actions such as: replying, using ‘Stars’, archiving, regularly opening, and deleting.

It will also be important for the user to interact and train the new Priority Inbox by using the + and – buttons or the ‘important’/’less important’ buttons. This will help the Priority Inbox learn which messages the user cares most about, in addition to teaching the algorithm about mistakes with mail marked as more or less important.

The new feature, like many of Google’s platform enhancements, is free to all Gmail users who opt-in. It is important to note that the Priority Inbox is a feature that can easily be disabled and is fully customizable for each user. From the Priority Inbox tab on the Settings page, a user can decide how many mail items each section should display (5, 10, 25, or 50), and which view is default. Additionally, even if the user keeps the Priority Inbox enabled, a tab for the ‘regular’ Inbox is still a choice on the left navigation pane and can be referred back to at any time.

If the user has not customized any of the settings and then opens a message within the “Important and unread” section, those opened emails will then move to the “Everything else” section once the window is refreshed. A user can change this by customizing the settings so that even unopened email that would normally be in the “Important and unread” section are listed in the “Important” setting instead. This process is illustrated in the two screen shots below:

What it all means:

In general, the Priority Inbox should help senders reduce abuse complaints and default Spam foldering since users will have more options to express their preferences with Inbox placement instead of pressing the ‘Spam’ button. In addition, Gmail should now find it easier to deem questionable email (aka; ‘bacn’) as ‘Everything else’ as opposed to placing it by default in the Spam folder. However, for senders whose email is usually prioritized in the Inbox, yet is now in the “Everything Else” section, this change may hurt messaging performance. Over the next few months, the CheetahMail deliverability team will track delivery performance changes at Gmail and report back on any noticeable differences Priority Inbox has made on client delivery efforts.

For more information, refer to: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/priority-inbox.html

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:

The second educational email from B-of-A explains the new features in more detail:

This is a strong campaign, especially for a company dealing with sensitive customer information like B-of-A. It is critical for financial institutions to set expectations for their customers so that the customers themselves are aware of what they are receiving, and can therefore recognize unauthorized emails more easily.

What do you think about the changes Bank of America has made? Do you think an email redesign will slow down the spammers? What else should businesses do to stop spammers? Share your thoughts!