rant
Today’s guest post is from deliverability expert Alison Gootee. She writes:I’m here to offer some empathy. If you’re experiencing difficulties delivering to Microsoft domains like Hotmail, Live, MSN, and Outlook, you’re not alone! Many industry veterans have reported similar struggles in their efforts to deliver even the best and most desired mail to Microsoft users in recent weeks. People with years (and decades) of experience are reporting longer remediation processes, requests going unanswered, and details being ignored. Microsoft has been in the game for a long time now, so I picture their mail filtering processes as a Rube Goldberg machine made of old rules, new patches, and conflicting priorities, held together by some Dunkaroos crumbs & Fruitopia that have been there since Microsoft bought Hotmail in 1996 (90s snacks were the best, you can’t change my mind). They’re fine with the way things work, though. It’s Microsoft’s world and we’re
Last week I talked about one-click unsubscribe and why I don’t think it’s a great process. Basically, my concern is bot clicks. I’ve seen it happen too many times — email security software will scan an email message body and follow all the links in the message. This triggers a one click unsub and can result in people falling off of an email list. Does it happen in the millions? Possibly not, but when it happens to the client when trying to send to themselves, and suddenly their CEO or CMO is mad that messages are no longer be received, it results in a client angry at a CRM or ESP platform. It’s pain, and it’s self-inflicted pain, and a smart sending platform should try to prevent this pain.TL;DR? One click should really be two click. Go read my prior “hot take” for more details.Anyway, a couple of ISP/MBP (mailbox…
Ugh, I hate that goofy stock photo. Needles make me itch. But it’s the best way to frame my concerns, I think. And I have concerns. Because domain reputation is a big deal of late. And I’m seeing people stumble into domain reputation issues — and not necessarily realize it — all because of domain sharing and shared reputation problems.Where? Mostly at Gmail. Domain reputation is definitely a big deal for the biggest mailbox provider, and that is Gmail. (If you’re a typical US B2C sender, the top three providers you’re sending to are going to be Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft OLC/Outlook.com, in that order. Gmail’s going to be 60%+ of your list, probably.)A Gmail mail rejection (NDR/bounce) like this specifically talks about domain reputation:smtp;550 5.7.1 [x.xx.xx.xx] Our system has detected that this message is likely suspicious due to the very low reputation of the sending domain. To best protect our…