inbox placement
Or…everything old is new again? Or something? Anyway, seedlist-based inbox testing has been around for a while. Pivotal Veracity was offering it up a good twenty years ago. Its heyday, an ex-PVer reminded me the other day, was 2003-2010, and then it was aquired by Unica, which later ended up folded into IBM … which is now Acoustic? I forget. But the inbox testing platform is long retired, I am sure. Anyway, it’s fun to take a look at the tests from years ago and see how much things change and how much things stay the same. Which mailboxes were tested back when this first test was run in early 2008? AOL, AT&T, Bellsouth, Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, CompuServe, Cox, Earthlink, Excite, Gmail, Hotmail, Mail.com, MSN, NetZero/Juno, Road Runner, USA.net, Verizon, Windows Live Mail and Yahoo. A lot of those are since gone or consolidated. I remember Mail.com used to be
I’ve spent a lot of time lately explaining what exactly seedlist testing is, how it works, and why it’s valuable. I like it. I have a bias, after all, in that my day job is product manager for a suite of deliverability tools, and that includes seedlist-based inbox testing (shameless plug: find more info about the Kickbox Deliverability Suite here). Occasionally somebody will tell me that they’ve heard that seedlist testing can’t be trusted or that it’s not useful now in 2022, because mailbox provider spam filters are so individualistically focused on user feedback. Yeah…they have a point…sort of. But not quite.It is very true that spam filters are very user-centric. Gmail, in particular. Your Gmail spam filter is different than mine. Gmail tracks individual user feedback and tailors the spam filtering experience, if you will, based on the different inputs that you and I provide to it. That means