When I'm in front of my mailbox, I often wonder about the consequences of some of my actions on the deliverability and reputation of the senders.
Like Jonathan Loriaux knows a lot about deliverabilityI invited him to a live chat to talk about all this. I shared my Hotmail box and asked him my questions. I give you the answers below!
For those who missed the live, here is the replay:
Question 1: Where is the "This is spam" button?
Example with the Badsender newsletter.
JLO: When you are on an email that you want to declare as spam, you have to click on the "Junk Mail" button at the very top. Oops! Did I fake the action on a Badsender newsletter? (Sorry Jon). The newsletter was automatically placed in the Junk Mail box. Of course, to fix my mistake, I clicked on "This is a legitimate email".
What does it do when I click on "This is a legitimate email"?
JLO: When you click on this type of button, you send a positive signal to Microsoft that this email is in fact wanted. So normally the screwup is fixed! I sent 2 contradictory signals in a few seconds. In this case, we hope that the operations cancel each other out but as always in deliverability, we can't know what weight Microsoft gives to these actions.
Why do I receive purchase confirmation emails in Junk Mail?
Example with a transactional email following the purchase of an ice cream!
JLO: There can be many different reasons. Most of the time these reasons are related to the reputation of the sender.
- Perhaps the sender's domain name has a bad reputation because the sender in question has bad practices.
- Maybe the IP address, which sent this email, is shared with other brands and these other brands have bad practices
- A third reason could be that the content of the message does not please Microsoft but this reason is marginal.
How do you help Microsoft understand that this is a transactional email?
JLO: It makes it easy for Microsoft! The content of the email must contain keywords that make Microsoft's message sorting tool understand that it is a transactional email, such as "customer number", "transaction number", "payment accepted", "order confirmation..." If these keywords are present and the email is still classified as spam, it means that the sender's reputation has taken over.
Also, in our example here, we are on transactional emails that come out of the Prestashop e-commerce tool. These emails are certainly sent from the IPs of the web servers on which Prestashop is installed. These servers are not made for sending emails. Not all Prestashop users must have ultra virtuous practices. The email templates of these tools are very standard. You need to be able to customize the templates of transactional messages so that they have their own reputation. This way Mircrosoft will not lump them in with other less virtuous companies.
You would have to at least change the standard Prestashop template and connect to a service dedicated to transactional emails.
Is it my hotmail mailbox that counts or the email tool, here outlook online?
JLO: That's a very good question! Here we are on the outlook.com webmail. So the anti-spam filtering part that counts is really the outlook web platform that manages it and that will manage all the reputation, the spamming, the feedback on complaints...
Does an email that arrives in spam to me, arrive in spam to everyone?
JLO: If your email goes straight to spam, there is a good chance that it will go to spam for all outlook users. (this is a reputation problem to be solved). However, if an email arrives in your inbox and you click on "This is spam", then it will only arrive as spam to you (well, to those who take this action).
Does an email that arrives in spam on hotmail, does it also arrive in spam on gmail, yahoo, etc.?
JLO: Aaah no! Microsoft's anti-spam filters are absolutely not the same as Google's, Yahoo's, Orange's... There is a difference that can sometimes be massive. Often it is Microsoft one of the most difficult to understand on deliverability issues (andHTML integration also let's face it ?). Microsoft can spam everything all the time while everything is going well elsewhere. Sometimes it takes weeks or even months to get out of it with improvements and good practices.
Why do I receive newsletters (sent to thousands of people) in priority mail? Normally I should receive them in Others?
JLO: Microsoft classifies in Other box, the emails that are little consulted. So if you receive newsletters in the priority box, it means that they must have a very good opening rate, they have a great reputation, a basic hygiene that is perfect. They are generally very well perceived by the anti-spam filters.
Why do I receive confirmation emails in my mailbox in Other?
Example: a Doctolib verification code email.
JLO: There is a real challenge for brands. It is to separate their transactional email flow from their commercial and marketing email flow. This involves, among other things:
- the use of a different sub-domain. Here, the domain is doctolib.fr, we could perhaps influence Microsoft's decision by using a sub-domain that is really dedicated to transactional messages.
- and the use of another IP address
This is a good way to tell Microsoft that such and such messages coming from such and such IP address from such and such subdomain are transactional emails, and therefore to place them in Priority. It's really important to be able to differentiate email flows according to message typologies and priority levels.
What does it do when I pin an email?
JLO: I don't know! (Yes! Did I get it?) That's a good question. Clearly the American webmails, unlike the French webmails, allow themselves to use a lot of the usage signals that are realized in the mailboxes. But, as said above, they do not reveal their recipe! One might think that pinning an email means that you are very interested in it, so it would be counted as a positive signal. But I won't be able to tell you yet if it really counts in the reputation scores.
On my inbox, when I click on an email and preview it. Am I counted as an Opener?
JLO: From the moment the images are loaded, the email is considered opened by the routing tool.
On my Spam box, when I click on an email and preview it. Am I counted as an Opener?
JLO: On the router side no, even if you read it, the email is not considered opened because the images are not loaded.
On the outlook side, however, yes 🙂
Need help?
Reading content isn't everything. The best way is to talk to us.
When I click on an email that does not have the images loaded, I am counted as a clicker. Am I automatically counted as an opener? Because we can deduce that if I clicked in an email then I read it?
JLO: It depends on the routing tools!
Does this mean that in the stats, we can have clickers who did not open the email?
JLO: Yes, it's clearly related to the router's policy. You have to ask them. Some will automatically assign an opening to a clicker, others will not.
What techniques do routers use to track opens and clicks in mailboxes?
JLO: The openings are tracked the moment the images are displayed since there is a small tracking pixel that will be activated the moment the images are displayed.
Clicks are tracked through redirects. The routing tools hide the final link behind a redirect. As soon as someone passes through this redirection, the click is counted.
But frankly, the opening stats are distorted from the moment the images are displayed by default?
JLO: Absolutely! If you systematically go through all the emails in your inbox and the images load, it's like opening all your emails?
Do transactional emails have to be on dedicated IPs to avoid temporary blocking due to the reputation and practices of other accounts?
JLO: This is clearly a good practice! But it's not always easy for everyone to have dedicated IPs.
- What is important is to use really professional services in terms of deliverability and not your web server which is not necessarily equipped to correctly manage transactional or other mailings (the management of bounces, complaints are often not correct).
- There is also a question of volume. Will my volume of transactional emails be enough to generate reputation?
So if you have too little volume, it is better to use a transactional email service that uses a shared IP. This shared IP will have a good reputation even if it is used by several companies because it will only be used for transactional emails from these companies.
If you have volume, you can work with your email marketing router and have a separate pool of IP addresses for these transactional emails.
The same type of email can arrive as spam to one person but as inbox to another for the same ISP if it is sent by different IPs and the same domain name?
JLO: Indeed on everything when you use shared IP addresses with others. You can have the same email sent with the same domain name that arrives in spam at one and in reception at the other because the email is sent from several different IP addresses. These IP addresses may have different levels of reputation. This kind of problem can be very difficult to solve.
Why do we sometimes see the word "Unsubscribe" displayed next to the sender and sometimes not?
We're talking about this:
JLO: That's a very good question! The "list unsubscribe" must already be present in the email. It is now in almost all routers. It is a small line of code that is automatically put in the technical header of the emails and that allows the webmails/FAI to display the mention. This is a good practice. But even if it is present, Microsoft does not systematically display this mention. Outlook will display this mention if the emails are little read. Gmail, on the other hand, is a little more systematic in its display.
Is this line of code list unsubscribe present on the email builder lepatron.email ?
JLO: No. This line of code is generated by your routing tool. This line of code is not in the HTML of the email but in the technical header that is generated by the router.
In deliverability training, you and Séb often say not to go from one week to the next in terms of sending volume because otherwise it would wake up the anti-spam filters. Ok but when I segment my base, can I go from single to double?
JLO: It's true they say that. In fact, spam filters don't like surprises. What is important is to have a certain regularity on the types of messages, the formatting, the frequency and the volumes. If once a month, you send 1 message to 1 million contacts and the other weeks you send to 200,000 people and this behavior is repeated month after month, then there is no problem. This is a behavior that will be retained.
On the other hand, if you have cycles of mailings that go in all directions, for example, a 50,000 mailing one week, then 400, then 10,000, then 2 million. Clearly, 2 million goes off the radar. There is a real need to be stable so that the messengers can expect to see your traffic.
How do we manage our targeting when iOS15 will send 100% of opens to our router? If we manage our sending only on clickers how to exclude iOS "fake openers"? what impact deliv?
JLO: We have just published an article on the subject. And on Thursday 23/09, we organize a live on the impacts of iOS15. Already, there won't be 100% of opens 😉 but we might get close to it in some conditions. We will clearly have to review the way we calculate deliverability monitoring, our reactivation scenarios for inactive addresses and all our emails that are based on opens....
It will also be necessary for the routers adapt, that they are able to separate the iOS15 statistics (and AppleMail in general because it is not only iOS that is affected but also MacOS). We'll ask them soon enough. But yes, from now on with these changes, we'll have real difficulties to trust our opening rate.
If you want to know more about the subject, attend the live session ! For this, no registration is required ! Simply save the event in your calendar via the links on the right: Apple Google Office 365 Outlook Outlook.com Yahoo.
When you have a base of 500,000 people, what is the best practice for heating the IP address?
JLO: We would need more time to answer the question but clearly at the start, we will have to send a few hundred emails per day at the beginning of a heating and gradually increase the volumes but it is not easy to give a generic answer. There is a real work of information to be done: at the level of past reactivity of the targeted people, the typology of the messages, the future frequency of sending, the number of IP addresses which are solicited, etc... if needed, do not hesitate! (otherwise there is this article which is a little dated but still true!)
To conclude, what's really important is to make it easy for the messengers to understand what kind of message it is. For transactional messages, you have to isolate them on a different sub-domain, on a different pool of IP addresses, use vocabulary that is very clearly transactional oriented, for which is a lot of elements that allow them to understand that it is a transactional email and therefore that the priority is high. Also, what counts in deliverability is the reaction of your recipients, so if your message contents are liked, there is no reason for you to have deliverability problems!
What is annoying in deliverability is that we keep a high level of uncertainty. Each messaging service has its own recipe and these recipes are constantly evolving! There is a cyclical issue related to the time of the year. In the week of Black Friday, the rules are not always the same as in the lowest moments of the year. The objective of mailboxes is clearly to provide security to their users but also readability. That is to say, to ensure that users do not receive hundreds of emails simultaneously. You have to keep this in mind. Good luck! and if you encounter any problems, do not hesitate!
