4 ms·

As anyone with half a clue about e-mail delivery will tell you: SMTP accept != delivery. Almost every spamfilter in the world will accept your e-mail and then

by moe 15y ago

As anyone with half a clue about e-mail delivery will tell you: SMTP accept != delivery. Almost every spamfilter in the world will accept your e-mail and then silently discard it. The 0.7% instant rejects that you see are merely the tip of the ice-berg. Thus, the only secret you gave away is that you don't seem to understand how spamfilters work.

snowwrestler 15y ago
Amen. Without a robust delivery testing program, there's no way to know whether emails are actually landing in the inbox of actual users. 37signals has an easier time of it because the vast, vast majority of their emails are transactional, so users will pipe up and complain if they are not getting them. Marketing emails are a lot harder to troubleshoot. And before the masses get up in arms about spam, when I say "marketing" I am talking about even the most compliant, user-friendly, double-opt-in email campaigns. Even if people happily sign up for your emails, that doesn't mean they will tell you if they stop receiving them.
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  > Even if people happily sign up for your emails, that doesn't mean they will tell you if they stop receiving them. Plus, when they decide they don't want it six months later, they'll use "Report Spam" to stop them from showing up in the inbox.
  - themcgruff 15y ago
    You comment reminds me that we left out a biggie: We include a "stop sending me these messages" link in almost every email we send. The link actually works too.
    - ceol 15y ago
      I think ceejayoz was saying some users are lazy or don't remember signing up for your service, so they'll click the "Report as Spam" button as a quick way to "unsubscribe".
      - joelhaasnoot 15y ago
        For some mailing lists you find yourself onto that's actually the case, removing yourself is next to impossible...
      - fierarul 15y ago
        Or some users assume that by clicking the "unsubscribe" link you are actually confirming the email is read and might get even more spam.
        taf2 15y ago
        That's probably because that's how it used to work. Remember before can spam laws?
        fierarul 15y ago
        What makes you believe it changed?
themcgruff 15y ago
I know this wasn't clear from the post... We include a "fake" image (with a unique has for that specific message) in all html email so we know if it's "really been delivered" (ie it was actually opened).
- peripitea 15y ago
  And you get a 99.3% return rate on your image? That seems highly unlikely given that many (most?) mail clients do not display images by default.
  - themcgruff 15y ago
    Copied from Noah's comment on the post (I asked him first): "We do track open rates for emails that are already HTML formatted and making remote requests for images, but you’ll never get 100% accuracy with that metric because many people use plain text emails or don’t load images. Our experience is that the best you’ll ever see is between 60-70% “open” rate because of this. Some of our applications in some contexts only send plain text emails as well, so we don’t track open rate there at all. Why is remote server acceptance rate important anyway? Some thoughts: 1) First, because hard bounces really do happen a lot, and at our scale, a 1% difference in hard bounce rate means 160k messages per week that aren’t making it to users, which means a poor experience for many and many support requests coming in to us. Based on all the information we’ve been able to find, we’re pretty sure a 0.7% hard bounce rate at our scale is pretty good. 2) Second, because it is a relative metric of overall deliverability. Our experience has been that when we do get on a blacklist, servers start hard bouncing our mail until we get off of it. As we’ve improved our SpamAssassin type scores over the last few years, we’ve seen an improvement in hard bounce rate. We also see a strong correlation between hard bounce rate and the number of email delivery related support requests we get. While it’s not the perfect measure, it’s the best measure we have available that we can reliably monitor. Again, there’s no perfect way that I know of to reliably tell whether an email is getting to a user, since read status isn’t particularly accurate. We use whatever we can (hard bounce rate, open rate, number of support requests relating to email) to get as close to that as we can."
- potyl 15y ago
mike-cardwell 15y ago
"Almost every spamfilter in the world will accept your e-mail and then silently discard it" I don't think that's true. I've been actively running email servers for going on ten years now and the vast majority of mail servers do the opposite. They reject at SMTP time. Accepting and then silently discarding email is considered bad practice, and is not as common as SMTP time rejection.
- kbutler 15y ago
  Server-side host-based filter (e.g., blacklists): reject at SMTP Server-side content-based filter (e.g., spamassassin): usually marks up the email based on rules, and may either reject/discard it, or leave it for the email client Email-client filter (e.g., in thunderbird, outlook extensions, etc.): silently discards

by moe 15y ago

snowwrestler 15y ago

Amen. Without a robust delivery testing program, there's no way to know whether emails are actually landing in the inbox of actual users. 37signals has an easier time of it because the vast, vast majority of their emails are transactional, so users will pipe up and complain if they are not getting them. Marketing emails are a lot harder to troubleshoot. And before the masses get up in arms about spam, when I say "marketing" I am talking about even the most compliant, user-friendly, double-opt-in email campaigns. Even if people happily sign up for your emails, that doesn't mean they will tell you if they stop receiving them.

ceejayoz 15y ago
> Even if people happily sign up for your emails, that doesn't mean they will tell you if they stop receiving them. Plus, when they decide they don't want it six months later, they'll use "Report Spam" to stop them from showing up in the inbox.
- themcgruff 15y ago
  You comment reminds me that we left out a biggie: We include a "stop sending me these messages" link in almost every email we send. The link actually works too.
  - ceol 15y ago
    I think ceejayoz was saying some users are lazy or don't remember signing up for your service, so they'll click the "Report as Spam" button as a quick way to "unsubscribe".
    - joelhaasnoot 15y ago
      For some mailing lists you find yourself onto that's actually the case, removing yourself is next to impossible...
    - fierarul 15y ago
      Or some users assume that by clicking the "unsubscribe" link you are actually confirming the email is read and might get even more spam.
      - taf2 15y ago
        That's probably because that's how it used to work. Remember before can spam laws?
        fierarul 15y ago
        What makes you believe it changed?

themcgruff 15y ago

I know this wasn't clear from the post... We include a "fake" image (with a unique has for that specific message) in all html email so we know if it's "really been delivered" (ie it was actually opened).

peripitea 15y ago
And you get a 99.3% return rate on your image? That seems highly unlikely given that many (most?) mail clients do not display images by default.
- themcgruff 15y ago
  Copied from Noah's comment on the post (I asked him first): "We do track open rates for emails that are already HTML formatted and making remote requests for images, but you’ll never get 100% accuracy with that metric because many people use plain text emails or don’t load images. Our experience is that the best you’ll ever see is between 60-70% “open” rate because of this. Some of our applications in some contexts only send plain text emails as well, so we don’t track open rate there at all. Why is remote server acceptance rate important anyway? Some thoughts: 1) First, because hard bounces really do happen a lot, and at our scale, a 1% difference in hard bounce rate means 160k messages per week that aren’t making it to users, which means a poor experience for many and many support requests coming in to us. Based on all the information we’ve been able to find, we’re pretty sure a 0.7% hard bounce rate at our scale is pretty good. 2) Second, because it is a relative metric of overall deliverability. Our experience has been that when we do get on a blacklist, servers start hard bouncing our mail until we get off of it. As we’ve improved our SpamAssassin type scores over the last few years, we’ve seen an improvement in hard bounce rate. We also see a strong correlation between hard bounce rate and the number of email delivery related support requests we get. While it’s not the perfect measure, it’s the best measure we have available that we can reliably monitor. Again, there’s no perfect way that I know of to reliably tell whether an email is getting to a user, since read status isn’t particularly accurate. We use whatever we can (hard bounce rate, open rate, number of support requests relating to email) to get as close to that as we can."
potyl 15y ago

mike-cardwell 15y ago

"Almost every spamfilter in the world will accept your e-mail and then silently discard it" I don't think that's true. I've been actively running email servers for going on ten years now and the vast majority of mail servers do the opposite. They reject at SMTP time. Accepting and then silently discarding email is considered bad practice, and is not as common as SMTP time rejection.

kbutler 15y ago
Server-side host-based filter (e.g., blacklists): reject at SMTP Server-side content-based filter (e.g., spamassassin): usually marks up the email based on rules, and may either reject/discard it, or leave it for the email client Email-client filter (e.g., in thunderbird, outlook extensions, etc.): silently discards