Email Deliverability: Chris Donald in Conversation With Matthew Vernhout

Chris Donald: Hey, everybody. This is Chris Donald with Inbox Army. I’m here with Matt Vernhout. He’s director of privacy and industry relations at Validity. Hey, Matt.

How are you?

Matthew Vernhout: Great, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Donald: No problem. My pleasure. My pleasure. You were we were on top of our list of people to do this interview series with, with thought leaders. I always think that’s kind of funny, thought leaders.

People go, you’re a thought leader. I’m like, man, I can barely remember what day it is. Anyway.

Matthew Vernhout: Sometimes it means I

Chris Donald: look at it,

Matthew Vernhout: and sometimes it just means you have a big mouth.

Chris Donald: Yeah. There there’s that too. Right? Alright. So our topic today is gonna be around deliverability and all the insanities that go along with that.

Right? You know, being an agency, we have people that will come to me come to us with delivery deliverability issues. And while we can handle basic deliverability issues, I always look at deliverability as being, you know, we’re, we’re your general practitioner, but, when you have a brain tumor, you go to a specialist. Right? And that’s what that’s what deliverability is to me, is you’re you’re a specialist in this one insane part of the email marketing channel.

And just like a doctor, while they can diagnose problems to a point, it isn’t always clear as to exactly what sometimes caused that problem, right, which started the problem. A lot of times you can tell, And, also, you can’t always tell how long it will take to fix the problem, just like a doctor. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: Sure.

Chris Donald: So and that’s hard on you guys, being deliverability guys, because it’s it’s hard to explain to somebody who just wants, hey. Fix it. Right? Right. That’s the attitude you get.

Right? At least that’s

Matthew Vernhout: what we Who at times are, this is your fault, not mine even?

Chris Donald: Right. Yeah. Like like, you’re part of the problem somehow. Right? Right.

So, alright, let’s talk about so we always hear authentication. Right? People hear authentication. Some people may not really understand what even authentication is in the email marketing realm. They have some idea, but why don’t you go through and kind of explain about authentication, why it’s important?

Sure.

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. Obviously, you know, there’s there’s more than one type, which I think is where people start to get confused, and some have been around a lot longer than others. So, you know, looking back, it’s sort of the oldest of the technologies when it comes to email is sender policy framework or SPF. And that’s really, it’s a way for a brand, to tell recipient mailbox providers, these mail servers are approved to send mail on my behalf. And that’s a DNS record that has a list of IP addresses or potentially service providers.

Chris Donald: And DNS, just for the people who don’t know, is domain name server. Your domain is what it’s it’s authenticating, that you own the domain and or it’s okay for you to send from this other platform now instead of your regular email.

Matthew Vernhout: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s sort of I like to refer to it as, like, the Internet’s phone book. You wanna call somebody.

You have to look up their name and what their number is, and DNS works similar. I wanna know something about, you know, inbox army and where their website is. So I asked the DNS system where does inbox army.com live, and it tells me it lives over here at this server. And then it does that look up and translation. So with SPF, so you you basically say, here’s all the mail servers that are allowed to send mail on behalf of this particular domain or subdomain.

Okay. Then from from there, the next one that’s sort of, you know, as we’ve gone through the the systems and and created newer technologies is is DCAM or domain keys identified mail, which uses, cryptography, to basically say this message, when it left, had this hash. And it hashes out certain fields and certain header values and and the body of the message, with a private key, and then the public key is then checked and validated by the mailbox provider to say, does this message match? And if so, then they can feel secure that not only did the message arrive in the same manner that it was intended to be sent, nothing was changed in between, but that the again, depending on the headers that are signed, it’s been approved by either the domain owner or the network sending it or both.

Chris Donald: Okay. Okay. And then we get into the one that makes most people crazy. Right? Which is DMARC.

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. So DMARC is sort of the newer, technology that that integrates with both of those and and sort of layers on top. It’s not necessarily so much an authentication solution on its own. It’s more of a

Chris Donald: Kinda like an add on?

Matthew Vernhout: It’s a policy, basically.

Chris Donald: Okay.

Matthew Vernhout: Right? So as as a domain owner, you can set a policy or or request a policy be applied by the recipient domain that basically says, if my mail fails authentication, both SPF and DKIM because only one needs to pass to have it to be considered a success. So if it fails both, then I would like you to take the following action. And that action could be do nothing. So don’t take any action.

It could be put the message in a quarantine or a spam folder because I’m pretty sure it’s not me. Right. Or you’re you’re very secure in your messaging. You could say reject the message. Don’t even accept it, because the likelihood of it being one of my messages is very low.

Chris Donald: Right. And that can be dangerous compare for some companies to say, decline. Right? If it’s if everything else isn’t set up properly. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: Absolutely. And I’ve seen companies rush to get to a reject policy with Demark and then impact their production. Because they’re they they feel very secure in their the quality of their authentication, but they rush and then they miss something And a critical component that they were looking at fails all of a sudden and none of the messages get delivered, which is problematic. And that’s sort of why the standard was built in a way to go from do nothing to do a little bit to do a lot.

Chris Donald: Yep. Yeah. So you could step it. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. And even then, you could step internally to say, only apply 10% of this. Apply 50% of the mail. Apply to a 100% of the mail. So you can even step that way, as you progress through.

Chris Donald: Yep. So for what I I mean and, you know, different mailbox providers or whatever or or or platforms, they can set up their own rules to for how to deal with this stuff as well. Right? So it isn’t like it’s all everything is perfect in one place, it’s gonna be perfect everywhere. That’s not the case.

Matthew Vernhout: Ideally, the standard would be the same. However

Chris Donald: Yeah. However

Matthew Vernhout: However, you know, history has shown that, different people choose to apply different weightings and different policies to the same sort of technology as it benefits their network.

Chris Donald: Right. Right. And because most people, you know, most people who are on free email. Right? Which is most people.

Right? I mean, think everybody almost in the in the US owns a free email account. Right? That used to be that was relatively rare back in the nineties. Right?

In the back in the nineties, you were paying for stuff. And then I think, like, yeah, Juno. I think Juno was one that came out. That was a free email, and that was a big deal. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah.

Chris Donald: And then, of course, the big hammer with with Google just said, okay. We’ll give you, you know, a terabyte of of storage and all kinds of stuff and and they just took over the world there. But let’s so I know there’s been some impact in the recent changes to authentication with Office 365. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s happening there?

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. So so I’ll give you the high level, but I I also recently wrote an article about this as well, and I could share that with you.

Chris Donald: Okay. Sure.

Matthew Vernhout: Or for later if you if you want to,

Chris Donald: share with you. If you give that link to us, we’ll, we’ll superimpose it on this later.

Matthew Vernhout: Sure. So, basically, looking back so Microsoft used to have a technology that they tried to get as a standard called sender ID, which looked at the, authentication similar to SPF before the, basically, the visible from or the the the mail from that people would see in their mail client. Because that’s oftentimes spoofed. And that didn’t really catch on the same way that SPF and and DKIM did. So, it sort of was depreciated over time.

But now what they’ve sort of looked at is said, you know, we see a lot of mail that has a, SMTP from, which is what SPF checks, that doesn’t match the mail from which the end user sees. And that’s actually not uncommon. A lot of email service providers are set up that way, where they are the actual transaction from, domain and email address, so they can manage balances and they can manage those types of things. And it manages SPF on behalf of their customers. But it doesn’t always match the mail from what people see.

So, what we’re starting to see is recent changes at Office 365 is if you don’t at least sign the mail from domain in those messages, they’re looking at them as highly suspect or potentially fraudulent. Oh. So they’ve really sort of stepped that up and taken which is, you know, many people would say is sort of a natural progression, but it’s a atypical application, if you will, of of DKIM and DMARC. So they’re looking at it to say, if you’re not authenticating your your visible from in at least one manner, typically DKIM, then they’re not gonna trust it as much. And they’ve added a new email header, that’s doing, like, displaying whether they think it passes or fails, as well as an error code, in that.

So you can actually see what the error code is, and then potentially adjust your program to to authenticate at least, the the mail from properly. Right.

Chris Donald: Right. So this is this is That’s pretty significant change, though. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: I mean It is. And it’s it’s been impacting a lot of people. I’ve talked with a lot of email platforms that, were kind of caught off guard by this. When the change happened, it happened mid to late January. You know, a lot of other providers may not seen it because they were already doing domain alignment, client mail from, client SMTP from being the same or very similar.

So they were already authenticating, or they were double d consigning with a ESP key and a client key already.

Chris Donald: Right. Right.

Matthew Vernhout: So depending on how your setup was, you may have been impacted by this. You may not have either.

Chris Donald: Right. But, yeah, you may have been impacted and had no idea why because you didn’t know this. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: And that sort of is how it surfaced and how I got to be aware of it is this sort of week started to get asked questions. People were like, have you started to see this? Do you know what this new header is? And then, you know, a few other people started to write about it, and we started to look around, and we found help articles. And then we wrote sort of a a summary to help people understand in a sort of instead of being a 20 page Microsoft document, it’s now, like, a

Chris Donald: 2 page. It’s now a page. Usual document. Right.

Matthew Vernhout: Depending on how into the weeds you wanna get, the 20 page document is is very helpful. I I’m sure it is. But for the

Chris Donald: average person, the 2 pagers Right. Probably gonna help better. Right? At least explain it to higher ups going, here’s what we have to change. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: Right. And we did something similar when Google changed their box vendor practices.

Chris Donald: Yep.

Matthew Vernhout: You know, there it wasn’t as significant in some of the changes that they made, but they certainly made some changes. So we wrote a summary for that. It’s all about

Chris Donald: with whether you want to or not. Sure. Yeah. So we didn’t, I was trying to trying to think. I I kept seeing a little message come up here.

Sorry. I have to just talk for a second. It said, your Internet your Internet connection is unstable. I’m not sure if that’s gonna show on the video or not.

Matthew Vernhout: I’m not seeing it. No.

Chris Donald: Yeah. Okay. So maybe it’s just me. Good. Good.

You know, with, because I’m working from home as most people are right now with the craziness that’s happening, you know, and and all the kids are home, and they’re doing online school, and they’re streaming, and they’re so Internet’s been a little crazy at times. Alright. So let’s go, we’ll talk about Bimini in a minute, but let’s talk about tips on diagnosing delivery issues, right, and how to address them. So, you know, when you see a sudden drop in in Google open rates or in in whatever you’re seeing. Right?

Because generally, that’s what happens is at a certain ESP or ISP, I should say, you know, obviously, your open rates drop in half.

Matthew Vernhout: Right? If you’re hopefully, you’re looking at your reporting by domain, and if you’re not, you should be.

Chris Donald: And not all ESPs do a great job of giving you that view, but most do nowadays. Yeah. You know, so, how do you diagnose that? How do you how do you go about that process?

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. So I think there’s there’s a few different ways, and first off, it’s sort of just watching your your standard open rates. You know, your standard click through rates, before getting into, like, the domain level stuff. And if, you know, they’re pretty steady, that’s not terrible, but you might actually be missing a domain or 2 that’s actually important depending on how your your breakout is. Right?

You know, if 50% of your email list is Gmail, the 5% change at Hotmail is not gonna make a big difference to your metrics.

Chris Donald: Right.

Matthew Vernhout: But if if Hotmail is, you know, 30% of your list and a 5% change, it will certainly move the needle. So you’re right. I think, you know, high level start at the very, very top. Is everything looking pretty standard? Everything’s looking, you know, 1, 2%, plus minus.

You’re probably pretty good.

Chris Donald: Yep.

Matthew Vernhout: From there, you’re right. Look at a domain level report. You know, are your opens, are your clicks, bounces, all of those types of things changing, You know, is there one domain that’s underperforming significantly? I I recently presented at the inbox expo around some of this information and, you know, the graph was sort of like, you know, Yahoo was here, Gmail was here, Hotmail all of a sudden is here, Office 365 is here, and then back up here is Comcast and, you know Yeah. Some of the other domains.

And, you know, it sort of calls out very quickly that you’re having specific problems, you know, in in that example

Chris Donald: Right.

Matthew Vernhout: With with sort of outlook.com and Office 365, and and it gives you a spot to to focus and say, well, what’s different about that? You know, is it is it some of the changes that we saw happen here that we just talked about in their authentication? Is it simply they’re a little more aggressive in filtering and you have to adjust for that? Is your Hotmail list maybe older? Did you do something funny to your Hotmail list?

Send them bad data? Something. Right? Yep. So looking back, I also like to look at things like opt in source.

So if you can if you can break out where your opt ins are coming from and identify them by source, you might identify 1 or 2 sources that are way underperforming. And underperforming either in clicks and opens, or, you know, over indexing and things like complaints and bounces.

Chris Donald: Yep.

Matthew Vernhout: So those are those are the cases where you maybe wanna look at your data from a different angle and then then say, you know, what’s wrong with this source? Is it set up differently? Is it a bad partner maybe? Is it an old site?

Chris Donald: Yep. Is it are you doing a are you doing a, a coreg and it’s not explained well? Yeah. Yeah.

Matthew Vernhout: I’ve even seen, like, point of sale, data in the past working with retailers where, you know, one store, compared to another, will perform completely different. And that could be things like staff training. It could be things like, you know, from if a manager has put some type of performance index or KPI against the number of email addresses each person is collecting. Yep. Usually, you and I probably both heard those stories.

Yep. And Yep. If you’re not meeting your quota, people start to make things up because they wanna keep their jobs. Right.

Chris Donald: Yeah. And then you have all these hard bounces and

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. And even call centers, you know, there’s lots of opportunity for typos when somebody else is trying to read you their email or things like that over the phone. Yeah.

Chris Donald: And that’s where and that’s where, you know, real time verification and and and hygiene can really help. Absolutely. Especially there.

Matthew Vernhout: And, you know, I’m not necessarily here to be, like, you know, buy all our products. But, you know, the the other side to it is, you know, the the 250 and k platform, even the return by platform, now that we’re both part of validity, offers things like inbox monitoring, inbox placement rate measurements, verification of addresses, validation of addresses, additional enhanced analytics. So if you’re saying not every ESP gives you domain level analytics, but it’s possible to use a third party that does.

Chris Donald: Yep.

Matthew Vernhout: So, you know, there are lots of tools that way that help with anything from inbox placement monitoring to validation to demark, enhanced analytics all in one place.

Chris Donald: Yep. But most most deliverability, and maybe I’m simplifying this to a point, but it seems like most of the ISPs, or at least the big guys, are really leaning more on the engagement of your list that you send to as being a high of the one of the high watermarks of whether or not email gets into the inbox. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: Absolutely.

Chris Donald: Right? So I don’t know, you know, what those percentages are exactly, but, you know, they wanna see a certain percentage of opens from what you send into their system, specifically like Gmail, let’s say. They wanna see a certain percentage open rate, right, to go, okay, most of the people want your email because they’re opening it. You have a, you know, good engagement rates, your engagement levels are good. You know, if you’re sending to a 100000 people and getting a 3% open rate, most of your email is gonna go into the spam folder and rightly so.

Right? Nobody cares, Caroline.

Matthew Vernhout: Well, the reason you’re getting a 3% open rate is because that’s where it all is.

Chris Donald: Right. Right. Or it’s already there. Right. Right.

Right. But that is one of the things. Right? They’ve kinda turned to that engagement model to a point where it was before it was very much a a, I would say, a reputation as far as sending reputation went. And then them looking at content and making sure they weren’t fishing and selling viagra or payday loans or not I’m killing the payday loan industry.

I’m not needing for some people, I guess, but, those are there are just a lot of bad actors there. Right? Yep. You know, it used to be so, you know, I I really got online with an email address back in 92, I guess, 90 3. And it was the Wild West.

Right? I mean, you were if you had an email address, you were getting porn, first of all. Right? I mean, it was just it was unbelievable. I mean, it was really well, most people don’t understand.

So in in Outlook or in, like, Yahoo, the default is images off when you open an account. You have to say show images. Right? That’s because they defaulted that way. Outlook back in the nineties was not that, or when Outlook became prevalent, images were on.

And eventually, there was a rule that images were off. And most people don’t know why that happened. They don’t know why images off even exists.

Matthew Vernhout: Right.

Chris Donald: And it exists because of porn. Right? So the rule was well, what happened was people would be at work and they’d open an email and they would see porn images. And some of them sued the company for forcing them to look at porn.

Matthew Vernhout: Right.

Chris Donald: And, unfortunately, or fortunately, I don’t know, they won. So companies said we need to do something, And so the providers of these platforms or software said, we’ll put images off at default. That way, it’s a user’s decision whether or not to turn the images on. Thus, it’s giving them the power to decide whether they wanna look at porn or not, I guess. But, but that’s But and and and looking back

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. Yeah. And and looking back, right, you’re talking early 2000, late nineties. Right? In the US, the anti spam legislation is actually can’t spam actually stands for, right, controlling, assault, non solicited Insolicited.

Marketing and pornography. Pornography.

Chris Donald: Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Matthew Vernhout: I’m sorry. Pornography and marketing.

Chris Donald: Prono yeah. Yeah. Right.

Matthew Vernhout: And, like, the the the reason the legislation exists is for that you know, it’s right in the name.

Chris Donald: Right. And enough was done. Not only that, but, you know, between the filtering and the blocking, nobody gets porn anymore or well, not not as spam, let’s say, I should say. There are probably people who do, but, but they don’t it so because what happens the reason it stopped, it wasn’t just because of legislation. It was everything, and it made it unprofitable to set.

Right? If you want someone to stop doing something, make it unprofitable.

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. I I wouldn’t say it’s completely gone away. I know that my Scam Traps still get it.

Chris Donald: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s still

Matthew Vernhout: some of it out there. Yeah. Yeah. And and you

Chris Donald: get the ones filling out forms on your website with it and things like that. Right? I mean, that still happens.

Matthew Vernhout: But, yeah, most people don’t long common long common spam in for for adult sites is significantly higher than my email spam for adult sites. Yeah.

Chris Donald: Right. Because they they they don’t have many avenues for it anymore. Right? Yeah. Okay.

So that being said, we I did mention BIMI earlier, b I m I. Yep. So why don’t you tell us what that is and and and how does it work? Right?

Matthew Vernhout: Sure. So, BIMI has a a couple different, initiatives, if you will, or or goals as a as an initiative. The first is to increase adoption of authentication and DMARC, because you can’t get Vimy without strong demark authentications. You have to demark at least a quarantine or a reject to start in order to even qualify to say, yes. I want to use BIM.

That’s sort of a a So

Chris Donald: you’ve already gotten at least to that second step in the process? Right.

Matthew Vernhout: So you’ve already got strong authentication, similar to what we talked about before.

Chris Donald: Yep.

Matthew Vernhout: And that’s sort of one of the driving factors is, you know, who doesn’t want their logo to show up everywhere as a brand marketer? Right? The next piece is, sort of, you know, it’s it’s sort of a, not directly an initiative, but it’s sort of an added benefit of, but Sorry. Phrased that wrong. With BIMI, what it allows you to do when you qualify.

So you have a good authentication, and and eventually, we’re gonna need validation, a verified mark certificate. So you’re actually gonna have to go and prove you own the trademark on the image or the image mark.

Chris Donald: Yep.

Matthew Vernhout: And then that will actually be sometime later this year, in order to to properly use BIMI. So that the the group, the standard group is still sort of defining the the final nuts and bolts on that and and what’s required. And then we’ll be rolling out that information

Chris Donald: as well. Okay. So so what does it what does BIMI do? What does what does

Matthew Vernhout: it look like? Right? So right now, if you wanna experience BIMI right now, send yourself some commercial email to your Yahoo account. Sign up for a couple different newsletters. And if you see a logo of the brand, next to the message when you open it in your Yahoo web browser, It’ll be next to the from address.

Chris Donald: Next to the from address. Okay.

Matthew Vernhout: Right? You won’t see it by default in sort of the the view of all the inbox messages, but you’ll see it when you click on a message. It’ll open up, and you’ll see the the logo next to the the from address and the recipient address and the subject line will show up. So that’s one place where you’ll be able to see it right now in any Yahoo client. You might see otherwise, right now, you might see, like, it looks like, maybe a couple of initials, for the brand or the individual sending you the messages.

It might look like images. It might look like little office buildings, as well. If you see those, those are different way that, Yahoo is classifying the messages that you’re reviewing. So it’s either an individual or it’s commercial, or it has a logo that Dave sourced, or it’s using Vim.

Chris Donald: Yeah. So my Yahoo mail, I just opened it up just to take a quick look. So right next to, you know, the sender name is a little blue dot. Right? Right now

Matthew Vernhout: click on that. Yep.

Chris Donald: Now on Yahoo, Yahoo sent me an email and their logo is where that blue dot is, so that’s where you’re saying it would be. Yes?

Matthew Vernhout: Yes. But you’re doing so you click on the message and it opens up the full body of the message so you can see, like, the full content. You should see a logo next to the name. You won’t see it in sort of the here’s all your messages list. You have to actually open the message in the web browser.

Chris Donald: Okay. But

Matthew Vernhout: on a mobile client, if you’re using the Yahoo mobile client as an example, you will see the logo in the inbox view before you even open the message. So I can I can just show you, not gonna be one that

Chris Donald: it would show up for, probably? Yeah?

Matthew Vernhout: Possibly, if they’re if they’ve implemented BIMI. Yeah. I have a sample here. I’ll I’ll send you I’ll show it to the camera. Yeah.

Chris Donald: If you can.

Matthew Vernhout: So so if you look here right? So you see this is the inbox view. So you see the class mate logo next to classmates.com? Yep. So that’s BIMI.

Okay. And then when you open the message, you see it here as well.

Chris Donald: Okay. Yep. Yep. So the same

Matthew Vernhout: thing when you, if you open the message in your web browser, you should see the same logo if they’re using DIM.

Chris Donald: Okay. So that’s sort of a good user visual qualifier that this email is actually authenticated and it did come from this company?

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. So it’s it’s sort of basically Yahoo Trust is sending enough Yep. That they’re going to display the logo.

Chris Donald: Okay.

Matthew Vernhout: And in in some testing that Yahoo has done, messages with a logo, you know, they’re preferred by consumers 10% more than messages without the logo.

Chris Donald: Okay. And what is what is the process or cost or all that to is it just something just for big brands, or can anybody do it?

Matthew Vernhout: Or a

Chris Donald: big cost prohibitive problem?

Matthew Vernhout: So right now, there’s no cost at all. It’s just a matter of setting it up. You have you know, Demarc is obviously has a cost of time and effort to set up properly. BIMI is right now, it doesn’t require a certificate or anything. That like I said, that will change in the future.

So in the future, the certificate will have a fee, much like getting a certificate to secure your website. Yep. It’ll be something similar. And those fees will they may be expensive at first, but, you know, over time, they may come down. But there is some actual validation that has to get done to say you own their logo.

So it’s not just a matter of going out and buying a $9 cert from website. You have to actually prove ownership of the logo. So there’s a little bit more friction there, that makes it a little bit more costly. Okay. Final pricing will be determined by the certificate companies.

Right? Right. The BME Group once said it, it would be the certificate companies. And currently, you know, they range anywhere from, you know, free to, you know, a couple of 1,000 of dollars depending on the company. Right.

Find your search from them and what you’re willing to pay for it. So Market. Market.

Chris Donald: Right. Yep.

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. Expect something, you know, greater than 1, but less than A million. Or a few thousand. Yeah. You know?

It could be you know, I’ve I’ve heard discussions of a couple $1,000 for some, you know, large brands. But, over time, I think that price will normalize as the market demands it.

Chris Donald: Okay. And I wanna wrap this up with one more question, and that is one that many people who have gotten themselves into trouble on a blacklist or something, of you know, describe the best ways that you would escalate that to an ISP if you run a blacklist or you’re currently being blocked or or whatever may be happening there. How do you escalate to an ISP? How do you because everybody goes, oh, you they won’t talk. You can’t talk to them.

They’ll tell you that, you know, they hate us. You know? I mean, that’s what you hear. Right? But

Matthew Vernhout: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Donald: There there are ways to to work this out. Can you explain a little bit about that?

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. So I I think the the first key is understanding, you know, why you’re being blocked. You know, a lot of ISPs or mailbox providers will return a bounce code reason. So reading your bounce codes is important. You know, if it says you’re listed on spam cop or you’re listed on a specific spam house list or you’re listed on, you know, a proof point reputation list or something like that.

Right. You know, that would be pretty clear. And that to me is an indication of I don’t need to go and talk to Yahoo about a Spam House listing. I should go and understand what Spam House is saying as an example. Right.

So, you know, they have a lookup page. You can go. You can punch in your IP address. You can punch in your domain name. And they will return back sort of their logic and their reason, as well as a contact us for help.

Chris Donald: Right.

Matthew Vernhout: Right? And typically, the response for most most, blacklist that you’re working with will be if you stop doing the bad thing that caused us to list you in the first place, we will remove the list. And that bad thing could be sending to invalids that are no longer you know, they become spam traps. They’ve been invalid for so long.

Chris Donald: Right.

Matthew Vernhout: Sending to addresses that have never existed, sending to addresses that only exist as fan traps and have been harvested off the web, those

Chris Donald: types of things. Yeah. The ones that are hidden on web pages that they put there on purpose. Yeah.

Matthew Vernhout: Or in some cases, it could be user complaint driven. Yep. So your users are your recipients and people you’re sending mail to are complaining to their provider or, you know, or directly to

Chris Donald: because they can’t complain to spam cop or spam house or whatever. Right? Yeah. So Most people don’t know to do that, but

Matthew Vernhout: Right. Understanding sort of the cause and changing that behavior, is is always the number one way. Right? But if if it’s something that has recently changed and you really haven’t changed anything in your program and maybe you’re just seeing more bulk delivery at an ISP or a mailbox provider, you know, typically, you start with an email to their support team. You know, Verizon, for example, has a very well laid out postmaster page.

So, you can go find their postmaster page. It will give you descriptions of what the air codes mean. It will give you access to your open a support ticket. And then usually within say, you know, 48 hours ish, someone will respond back with maybe with some information or they’ll look at it and say, well, we’ve decided to remediate this issue, you know, do better next time. Right.

Or else this might happen again. But in in the odd case that, you know, you get back an answer that is like, well, we’re not changing any. And we’re not telling you anything else. You know, working with a deliverability professional at your I s at your ESP, or a third party company such as Validity, or with an independent contractor, however you want to go about doing that, you know, they may have access to either additional insights, additional information. Maybe they can, you know, ask a personal contact that they’ve made at that that location for maybe a little bit more details.

They’re they’re typically not gonna say, hey. Just pick up the phone and fix this issue for me. Right. Right. That’s not how it works.

Right. There is no back phone to say unblock me.

Chris Donald: Yeah. There’s no button. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. There’s there’s no button that says that. You know? And if if there is a button, it it only works once. Right.

Chris Donald: That’s right. That’s right. And I I I do wanna I do wanna say one thing. So I I wanna say that it’s a misnomer, because I’ve heard people say, oh, well, they’re blocking my email because I’m a republican or because I’m a democrat or because, they’re friends with this other company who’s my competition or or because of whatever. Right?

I mean, those are none of those are true, first of all. Right? They don’t No. None of the I the ISPs or spam house, they trust me, spam house would be happy if they never had to black host anybody.

Matthew Vernhout: That’s

Chris Donald: because they’re not that’s not in other words, they don’t care they don’t they don’t care who you are necessarily, it’s just the actions that are happened. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: And and if you think about the big mailbox providers such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, it’s all machine learning. So the machine learning is looking at the behavior It doesn’t know that it’s a republican sending it or if it’s a democrat sending it You know, if you get into some maybe the really smaller self managed domains, individual style domains, you may run into some personal bias, but at the same time, you’re talking about 1 or 2 users. You’re not talking about No. And and even companies, you know, it’s not uncommon for companies to blacklist their competitors. Yep.

Yep. Right? Like, you you either can’t receive our mail outbound because we don’t want you to read our blog posts. We don’t want you to get our email subscriptions.

Chris Donald: Which is just showing.

Matthew Vernhout: Download our white papers.

Chris Donald: Right. But yeah.

Matthew Vernhout: So do

Chris Donald: you know yeah.

Matthew Vernhout: Lots of companies do that. You know? And and I think there’s there’s a lot of reason there’s a lot of reasons that ISPs certainly don’t do that because it opens them up to a lot of legal, exposure. Right. Right?

If there if there is an individual within a company that is doing things for political gain or for monetary gain.

Chris Donald: You

Matthew Vernhout: know, there’s certainly a lot of lot of legal exposure, especially in the US for stuff like that.

Chris Donald: Right. No. No doubt. No doubt.

Matthew Vernhout: And we saw that happen. We saw that happen with one of the early presidential campaigns. You know, the anti fraud mechanism kicked in with the Google advertising because their account went spending from a, you know, a normal amount to a significantly larger amount in a very short period of time, and the anti fraud measures went, woah. Woah. Woah.

This looks like fraud.

Chris Donald: Right.

Matthew Vernhout: And then suspended everything. Well, you know, that that candidate then sued Google or at least tried to sue Google, and it was recently thrown out to basically say, you know, the the fraud department was doing their job protecting you. Sure. And I don’t know if that was the exact reason. But, like, the the basis of when I look at it is the fraud department did the right thing and stopped what looked like actual fraud.

Right. Yeah. It’s kinda like become that edge case.

Chris Donald: Yeah. It’s kinda like, you know, in that case, it’s the fraud department did their job, just like if you used a credit card and they declined it because you’re doing something outside your norm. Right. You didn’t tell them you were traveling, and all of a sudden, you’re buying dinner in in, in Thailand.

Matthew Vernhout: Right.

Chris Donald: Then, yeah, they may stop that payment and check with you and send you a text, and you send them back and say it’s okay, and then, you know, it now, the whole email world takes a little while to change that process. Right? So, but, yeah, I want people to know that, you know, nobody is out to get you. Nobody is out to stop your mail for nefarious reasons 99.999 percent of the time. Okay?

Like you said, you may have a

Matthew Vernhout: bunch of And machines make mistakes sometimes.

Chris Donald: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And it has to be machines. Right? There’s no way that people could manage this at the level of emails, the billions and billions of emails that happen daily. Right. So it has to be done this way with algorithms and and learning and and that type of thing.

Yeah. Okay. And for one last thing, I just wanna get this off my chest because most people, I still see it all the time. Will the word free in a subject line get your email blocked?

Matthew Vernhout: No. No. We’ve we

Chris Donald: I know. I know it doesn’t. I know it.

Matthew Vernhout: We we as an we as a collective group of security individuals for, the email world have moved well beyond certain keyword. You know, for the most part, certain keyword filtering, you know, that, you know, domain and IP reputation are significantly weighed, You know, if if if you were saying it’s like that 99% is domain and IP reputation and past engagement and 1% is content. Right? That 1% free word is not going to

Chris Donald: To you know, change the

Matthew Vernhout: Even right now, there’s a rather lengthy discussion happening and sort of a lot of what I would look at is misinformation about people using, you know, the current pandemic, in their emails and talking about, you know, putting that in their subject lines and the body of their messages. You know, I’m getting 20 or 30 messages a day with that in the subject line and in the body of the message. They’re delivering perfectly fine. Yep.

Chris Donald: You know, I look at my email here and I see, you know, I see COVID certainly a bunch of times. I see the word 3 at least 4 free at least 4 times. I see dollar amounts. I see percentages. Yeah.

Because oh, that’s the other thing. Oh, don’t put dollar signs.

Matthew Vernhout: Percentages, lots of exclamation points.

Chris Donald: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, don’t

Matthew Vernhout: Again, those are very small domains that are less, you know

Chris Donald: Shabby or have a

Matthew Vernhout: Shabby or have less access to machine learning or some of those types of tools. Sure. But they’re gonna be more of the edge case and for most commercial mailers outside of the Microsoft, Gmail, Yahoo worlds.

Chris Donald: Yeah. You it’s just a small number anyway. Right.

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. Even looking into the filtering providers like Proofpoint and Yep. Mimecast and things like that. Like, those cover a significant portion of the the Internet that most people in marketing care about. And those platforms aren’t blocking the word free.

No. They’re blocking poor reputation. They’re blocking poor engagement.

Chris Donald: Right.

Matthew Vernhout: And when people talk about, you know well, 2 weeks ago, my email was delivering fine, and then I sent out 17 messages around COVID 19, and I got, you know, 20% more spam complaints than I used to. And now all my messages are going to the junk folder. It wasn’t because you started to use the word COVID 19 or coronavirus or free. It was because your reputation slid because people didn’t want your messaging anymore. It was no longer relevant, and they weren’t engaging with

Chris Donald: Right. Yeah. And, you know, and stop sending to people who haven’t opened up an email in 2 years. Okay? Alright.

Matthew Vernhout: Yeah. A prime example for that is I got an email today from a a business that I do. You know, I have an I have an account with that doesn’t ever require me to go to their locations. Yep. Everything a 100%.

In the entire time that I’ve had the account, I’ve done a 100% online business with them. Yep. They sent me an email that said, for your local store, your local location, here’s the individual that if you need some help with, you can go talk to them. I’ve never once set foot

Chris Donald: In a store.

Matthew Vernhout: In their location. Never once set foot, you know, in in a physical location of theirs in recent memory. Sure I have in my entire life, but in recent memory. Right? And I’ve been doing business with this company since I was in college.

This is like 20 something years. Yep. I’ve been and I can’t tell you the last time I was in one of their physical locations. Everything’s online. Everything’s been managed that way forever, but I got it.

Here’s what we’re doing at your specific nearby location.

Chris Donald: Yeah. Not important. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: For me, zero importance.

Chris Donald: Yep.

Matthew Vernhout: Because I don’t have the right type of relationship with them as a business.

Chris Donald: And and they probably could have segmented on that if they really paid attention. Right?

Matthew Vernhout: I would have hoped so because they’re a very large organization. Right?

Chris Donald: Right.

Matthew Vernhout: But that also sometimes gets in the way. They’re such a large organization that it’s easier to one message everybody.

Chris Donald: That’s right. Because it’s important everybody gets it. Well, no, it isn’t, but okay. Right.

Matthew Vernhout: Right.

Chris Donald: Alright. So Well, listen. I wanna wrap this up. I thank you. We’ve gone a little over time, but that’s alright.

I appreciate you

Matthew Vernhout: Oh, you’re so welcome.

Chris Donald: Well, me too. That’s the problem. Right? We got 2 people who like to talk, so, not a problem. And and and we like to talk about what we know.

Right? So, listen, I appreciate your time. You’re a rock star. You were on our list when we started doing the series. So, I thank you for giving us your time.

We do appreciate that. And, as soon as we have it online, we’ll let you know. And, again, thanks for your time.

Matthew Vernhout: Thanks very much.

Chris Donald: Alright, buddy.