Diagnosing Delivery issues with your own Data

So we're gonna get started here. Thanks very much for for joining today. For those of you who don't know me, I look a little different in the picture I got to waiting on some new headshots. But so I'm the Director of Privacy and Industry Relations at Validity 250OK, I'm a CIPP. So I'm certified privacy professional. I've been doing this email thing for a long time, I'm involved in a lot of groups, I'm going to bore you with reading them all. I am an author, I've written a book on Canada's anti spam legislation, with a couple of lawyers that I know as well as I've been writing emailkarma since 2007. So it's quite an archive of history of email. If you ever get bored and want to look back at what deliverability people were saying, in 2007, versus 2020, surprise, surprise, it's actually not that different. But there are some some hidden gems in there, if you will. And if you ever want to reach out to me at email, karma is where you can find me on Twitter. So before I get into, you know, diagnosing your own delivery issues and understanding the the context of you know why email is important, you're all here, you understand email is important. But really, email is super important to a lot of businesses, especially right now, considering nobody can go outside. And a lot of businesses and their brick and mortars are actually closed. So even more, so I think we'll see a reliance on email and businesses shifting the way they do work. Just as an example, my wife works in retail, and they've closed their retail location. And now they're only doing online orders and curbside pickups. So certainly a huge a huge shift for their business model. And it'll be interesting to see how well they adapt and those types of things. So I'm looking forward to seeing how businesses evolve. And you know, in times of crisis, businesses really need to change and look at how they do things. So this will be really an interesting period of time for everybody around the world, I think. But email still has probably one of the best ROI is in the business Campaign Monitor came out with a report last year 44 to one ROI, which is which is pretty, pretty interesting, and pretty crazy. Cyber Monday has been ridiculous. Adobe reported $9.2 billion in online sales last year. And the chart on the right hand side here. So this is a historical trend of email volume through the Twilio sendgrid platform over the last decade in regards to Cyber Monday, Black Friday. And it's really showing how email has continued to grow. And when people say email is dead, these are the types of shirts I showed them to say, yeah, let's let's talk about how dead It really is. You know, and metrics are easy understanding how email works, and understanding how your performance of your platform and your messaging and how successful things are. It really is easy. Does everybody else have a dashboard that looks like this, or something similar, or maybe even you know, more complex, depending on your platform, you know, finding the nugget, finding the golden item inside or finding in the case that we're going to talk about today, finding the problem and identifying the problem in your platform and your email programmes in order to work on fixing those. Did you lose audio? Can everyone else hear me still? You're good. Okay. I did have that problem. So I just had to refresh the screen on the last session as well. And it came back. So if you're having that problem, simply just hit refresh. And you'll come back into the session and it should work again. So I was able to resolve that problem in the last presentation. So I'm certainly looking here, you know, email was everywhere, you've got problems. In the last session, we talked about accessibility and you know, what rendering looks like and, you know, understanding what devices are important to look at and how to code for those devices. Those are all different things that impact your deliverability they impact your metrics, they impact how consumers engage with your programme. And you know, I don't have to tell anyone on the call, email was hard, right? email was really hard. And actually, I saw that this was part of Kate's session yesterday as well. So it's a trend. And we certainly have talked about this in the past. But you know, as an email expert, you don't just need to understand email, you need to understand a little bit of data management, you need to understand a little bit of privacy, you need to understand a lot of legislation, copywriting analytics, you need to really understand a whole lot of things or work with a team really closely, in order to manage these types of things. And, you know, I talked to a lot of email marketers, and most of them are small teams. So they're juggling many hats, they're trying to understand all these things. And, you know, catching those problem areas, catching those issues where you need to understand, you know, what's my delivery at hotmail? What's my delivery at Yahoo like today? Those are where you need to sort of spend a little bit of time to catch some of these things. So how do you know if you have a delivery issue? Well, there's lots of indications lots of things that can tell you when you might be having a delivery issue. So if you're watching each of your campaigns, and you notice that you have a trend, bounces are usually pretty low, all of a sudden you see a spike and bounces. There's a problem that you need to dig into complaints, hope you're monitoring all your complaints working with your ESP s to understand, you know, where they're coming from, how many you're getting, what type of impact that can have, if you're watching all of your other metrics, you know, open rates, you know, we talk a lot about how open rates, they actually matter anymore. They're a great bellwether in regards to what your programme is saying. They're great directional advisor in regards to you know, your open rates trending up, up, down, staying pretty flat. Those types of things are easy indicators. And they're easy metrics to follow and sort of catch in regards to how your programmes doing, obviously clicks and conversions, those are the key metrics that people want to start looking into, you know, are you actually achieving the goals of your programme? Are you getting clicks? Are you getting purchases? Are you getting people downloading your white papers, reading your articles, whatever your actual conversion goal is, when you're watching those, are they changing? Are they trending in a negative way, these are all early indications of problems or potential problems with your email programme, as well as things even around delivery time. So if you're not actually aware of how long it takes for a message to get from your server, when you're sending it to a recipient, that's something to pay attention to as well. So if you have a decline, or an increase, or an increase in time, from sending your message to your consumer receiving it, there are things that you can look at, maybe you are being rate limited due to a reputation decline, maybe you're being rate limited due to a shared IP with too many complaints. Maybe your authentication has changed. And there's a problem. So you're being rate limited because of problems with your authentication. So these are types of things that will help you on your own using your own data, understand where you're having potential reputation issues, obviously, then you can take those, and you can tie them back to a domain or service provider, that will actually help you narrow down the specifics of what actions to take. And we're going to talk a little bit about that in a few slides. So So yes, Stephen, I guess the the best way, there's a few different ways. You know, you can have seed accounts, at your top domains if you can, if you can get those yourself. And you can measure sort of the time to deliver from start to finish. You can also look at, you know, if users are complaining about receiving mail late, and that's sort of my next one. So users are complaining about either receiving a mail after, after a promotion has ended. Maybe the promotion started, and they're getting an email halfway through a day, depending on what your platform or what your your programme is about if it's if it's sales or things like that retail. You know, I've seen that before, where you get user complaints that come back through a marketing team basically saying, you know, I didn't get the mail for the sale, it ended. So that's just a bad user experience. But that's a way that you can use that information to then go back and track to say, am I having a reputation issue? I've also seen users complaining about not receiving mail. So when you get those loyal programme, consumers that want to receive your email, they're used to getting a message every Wednesday night, because Thursday is when your flyer starts in your retail location. Or, you know, your your normal. You know, if you're in the airline industry, which right now maybe isn't the best example. But in general, you know, if they're their deals go out Tuesday night and the sales go on Wednesday, and everybody knows that the sales go on Wednesday. Then you're gonna get people that complain that they're not receiving you. So those are the consumers you really want to listen for, and you want to have your social listening set up, you want to have your consumer, your customer service feedback, loop back and feeding this type of information into your marketing. As well, as, you know, obviously, I working for a delivery service organisation, I would be remiss to say like using a deliverability monitoring service, I'm not here to pitch, so don't worry about that. But using a service to monitor deliverability, using a service to understand where you're potentially having problems, do some testing, you know, campaign pre deployment, and then obviously monitoring for black listings on either your IPS or your domains. And, you know, looking for other signals around spam trap activity, those types of things. All of these are metrics that you have readily available to you in your existing ESP platform, except for maybe the last two items here. But even those are probably a tool or a service that your email platform is using to help monitor their reputation and in turn, help monitor your reputation. So I would say make friends with your USPS deliverability people as well, they're gonna help you out in times of need, or in times of issues. So, I know it's kind of a lot to talk about there. But you know, these are sort of the next pieces on how to identify all of those things and things you can look at. So obviously, you know, there's a whole wide number of things. But obviously, your own data, your own analytics, listening to what others are saying, implementing the available postmaster tools, and then you know, any type of third party deliverability tool or something that your ESP offers. So this is a this is sort of real data, from an account that we were working with, you know, when you average things across the board in regards to what their metrics look like, they have a really strong email programme, click rates are fantastic, open rates are great. But when you start to look into individual domains, and individual sort of responses from those domains, you start to see a pattern. And in this case, the hotmail domain, and sort of the Microsoft domain fits into sort of their secondary domains, MSN web, TV, those types of domains, and obviously, the, you know, the office 365 stuff. So you're starting to see this pattern, where everything seems to be really strong in regards to delivery, except for these few pieces. So this would, when I look at this data, this is where I say, Okay, now I need now I know where I need to focus, I need to start looking for specific recommendations, specific issues and specific remediation issues within the the office outlook.com sort of realm of delivery. And this is actually a very common trend for people right now. Especially with the recent changes that Microsoft made to their authentication platforms in the office 365 network, which we've seen a little bleed over into the hotmail solutions as well. And if the outlook.com solutions, so they're making changes, they're looking at authentication from a different point of view. And, and I can get into that a little bit later. I don't necessarily have slides on that right now, because it's sort of new. And it doesn't actually work in the theme of this. But if there's questions about that, I'll try to get to them at the end. So this is sort of the first step, stop looking at your metrics overall, how did my campaign do and start looking at how did my campaign do specifically at these domains? When you start to see things, maybe you see a huge spike in bounces, maybe you see a huge decline in clicks, right? So these are the types of things to pay attention to when you're looking at your campaigns. Other ways to look at it, you know, if you don't have a graph, start looking at your analytics. So you have analytics set up the same way. So this is the same campaign. But if you look delivered, great, looks fantastic. Everything's in 97 Plus, percent delivered, bounce rates are pretty low across the board, virtually no deferrals. But when you start to look at things like your unique open rates, right, this is another indication. And these are probably easier metrics for people to get access to you don't have to do any work to build a graph. And these are the types of things that you want to start looking at. So this is the exact same campaign data that you saw before, but presented just slightly different. And then you actually can see specifically, where there are problems that you need to start to address because that's a pretty drastic difference to say, you know, only an 11% or 12%, open rate@hotmail.com whereas Gmail is 93%. So that's, that's a pretty strong indicator and something to look at when you're when you're reviewing your metrics. So then going into the next section around what other people are saying. So there's lots of places that people talk. There's lots of places that people have conversations about deliverability. And ask questions. And events like this even are great, because I wish I should have put up events here. But I guess we'll just drop them under the email delivery experts bucket. But, you know, Google postmaster pages, other mailbox provider pages. So there are a number of other mailbox providers that have postmaster pages around what their error messages are, what their expectations on performance and authentication and message structure should look like. So there's lots of information out there on how to maximise these things. You know, smds, from from the Microsoft network, signal spam, if you're, if you're participating in that programme, which is predominantly in France, Twitter. So if you're not following like hashtags, email geeks, those are things to pay attention to, because people will start to talk about delivery issues as they're happening across the board. Other other Slack, so there's the email geek Slack, obviously, I think there's a hopefully a large number of you, I recognise a lot of the names. Then also, you know, talking with email delivery experts, so that's where I say, you know, talk with your ESP, make sure you know, the team there, make sure you have a good relationship with them, you typically want to be asking them questions, as opposed to having them reach out and say, hey, we've noticed you have a problem, right? be more proactive about how you engage with your team. Again, so you know, these are just some slides, just some sort of high level images around what you can look at. So in the top left corner, the two slides there from the Google Webmaster Tools, they're giving you an indication of what reputation looks like, according to Google. In the bottom corner, on the bottom, right, so this is signal spam. So signal spam gives you some additional inside top right, is Microsoft smds. And then, you know, we're just sort of looking around to say, you know, here's where there are some potential problems. You know, everything's colour coded colours are nice makes people understand exactly, you know, where you're seeing problems and those types of things to pay attention to. List health is also a great resource, or a great thing to monitor and pay attention to. So understanding, you know, is your list growing, if your list is shrinking, there's potentially problems you need to look at. If your list is growing at a healthy rate, then you're probably doing things pretty good. But one of the things I always like to look at when clients come to me and they're talking about having delivery issues is understanding the data sources. So data source is also a big metric to pay attention to in regards to how is your list doing? Or is it healthy? Is there problem areas do you maybe have a list source that is feeding you a lot of bad data that could be impacting your reputation. And this is a bit more of a challenge, because most programmes aren't set up this way to start. But over time, implementing things like this can really sort of change how you look at your list and how you look at data sources and how you want to continue to focus on things that work really well for your list and things that work really poorly and get sort of trim those out of the programme. So I have this put together, this is just fake data. I made it all up here. But the idea is understanding your sources. So if you're not tracking your email sources, in regards to like, exactly, you know, what webpage they came from? Is it a purchase? Is it store level? Do you have a call centre data feed these types of different processes in regards to understanding the exact metrics of where your email is coming from? This is something I think you should look at building, because this will give you a pretty early warning sign for delivery issues or potential for delivery issues as you go forward. So we're just gonna look here. So what is your bounce rate? across each of these metrics? You know, I kind of looked at these and there's a 10 examples. So I flagged the top five, right? Again, this is just fake data, I made it up. It's nothing, you know, but a lot of it is based on sort of past experience working with customers and understanding where, where that data comes from. So you know, just looking at this, you get some bad data from your store, people typing addresses, if you're not doing any type of validation. You have maybe a publisher that's been running, some co registration for you, or some type of contest for you. You have point of sale you have a store, looking into those types of things to say you know, why is one store perfect Much better than another, these are all different things to kind of look at call centre, maybe you have some typos, then you can start to look at things like your unsubscribe rates. So maybe you have some, some issues with, you know, people coming into a contest. And then you look at, you know, maybe another partner, so why are people unsubscribing? You know, typically people look at unsubscribing as, and you can even lump in complaints, you could even lump in clicks, you could dump in opens, these are all different types of metrics, you can then layer on top to see where you're getting good quality data from, and maybe less quality data from as a way to identify sources and things to look at, then, you know, as I mentioned, complaint rates, so you want to look at where are you getting the most complaints from? What type of metrics are they driving, and then sort of average, across the board, these types of things. So, looking here, not really any one source that stands out, typically really bad except for, you know, maybe we have here and care a one. So this would be like a co rich partner. And, you know, they kind of hit the metrics across all three as being in the top five worst, across the board. So this might be one you look at and say, What is this publisher doing differently than our other publishing partners, just as a way to say, you know, this might be a feed that's giving us low quality data that we need to understand and we need to fix. So just before I move on, so a couple questions, and a good hacks for fixing deliverability challenges. Back in my delivery days, I had a few but would love to hear from you on creative ways to increase engagement and lower compliance. You know, it's, it's sort of a broken record thing. But good quality data equals good quality metrics. It's it's timely, that this is exactly what we're talking about. Because this is how I look at data to understand if there's, there's bad inputs. If you have bad inputs, you typically have bad output. So it's, it's a little outside of sort of the normal deliverability hacks, if you will, but looking at these types of things, looking at these metrics, and really narrowing down to say, you know, these are my worst sources. So I looked at this and said, who really, you know, came out across the top as sort of where I would say, let's review these sources. This is a outside of the box sort of way to look at this. And like I said, not a lot of places are able to do this, because they haven't set up their tracking in this regard. But if you can, or if you think about it going forward, this will show you where you're potentially getting the worst data that's getting into your platform. And it'll be different for everybody. In some cases, it will be just the homepage, because that's the only place you collect information from. But in other places that will be you know, I bought a list, and I had a partner that did co rides, and we ran 10 contests and call centre and things like that. So these are ways to help sort of identify those. How to track inbox placement, especially Gmail ISP. I'm going to get to that in a little bit. That's more around some of the deliverability tools that I'll talk about as we go. And then, once you hit bad domain reputation and Google postmaster tools, is there no hope for that domain? Is it possible to recover? Absolutely, I've worked with a lot of brands, and a lot of domains and a lot of companies to recover what is once considered a bad domain or poor reputation at gmail, there's a lot of work that needs to go into it, you need to make sure that you are practising good data hygiene, good data quality, targeting the right people. And really start with low volume and build from there. Anytime you have a declining reputation at gmail, or Hotmail, or any of the domains, you can recover these by simply reviewing the data sources, and it can take anywhere from 30 6090 days, it really depends on how bad it was how many changes you need to make. But I would say at a minimum, you'll start to see improvement in 30 days. And from there, you can build right from a bad, medium, high reputation over time. We've even seen working with some clients that just by improving things around their authentication, you can improve their their metrics, implementing things like demark because what it will do is it will reduce some of the noise it will reduce some of the spoofing potentially against your domain that causes consumers to no longer trust your brand. But yeah, we've we've definitely seen it with with brands where we've gone through that process and identified some of their bad data some of their bad sending practices have been able to move their reputation from either a medium to a high or a poor to a medium in sort of 30 and 60 days, it's just it takes a bit of work, it's not something that is easy to recover, if you don't change your mailing practices. So the last thing I wanted to talk about here, when it comes to measuring your sources really comes down to, you know, sources you control. And point of sale has the potential to be fantastic. But it also has the potential to be very poor, you know, can can can really impact your metrics. And there has been stories if you've been around long enough, and you've paid attention to sort of news and industry conversations, where some businesses will say, you know, every time a shopper comes, you need to get an email address as a point of sale service representative, you need to be you're being measured on the number of addresses you collect. So we're watching. And if you don't hit a certain quota, there's going to be problems with your performance reviews, etc. so this can actually lead to point of sale stuff, creating fake data, creating bad data, just generating things that maybe are impacting your reputation as a company that they don't know about, because they're not email marketing experts, they're just looking at it from the point of view of I need to hit a number every day. If I'm not hitting that number, there's a problem. So implementing things like that, or implementing sort of store level policies is something to sort of pay attention to and sort of look at, and maybe here, what you're seeing is one store performs significantly better than the other. And maybe it's the manager, and maybe it's the way the staff was trained, maybe it's something they're doing. So things like this or, you know, little nitpicky things that you can work through over time, and maybe better train staff, to to collect addresses and collect information. feedback loop data. So lots of different places provide feedback loop. This is by no means a complete list. But you can get working with your ISP or if you send mail on your own. You can work to get feedback from these ISP in regards to users generating spam complaints, users generating negative reputation data towards your information or towards your domain and your business. So looking at these understanding the trends working back like the last slide, where did these individuals come into your programme, this is going to help you fix things at the top of the funnel, so that when people continue to move through your programme, and they get near the end, you're going to be able to reduce the number of complaints that you're seeing. blacklisting. blacklisting certainly is a problem for a lot of businesses. And they can generate based on a whole number of different things. It could be bad data you're sending to spam traps you're sending to unknown users, it could be user complaints. So not everybody that uses the feedback loop or not everybody uses a feedback loop. But their ISP, and their mailbox providers may be tracking complaints, and therefore implementing policies around those things. How frequently Are you getting listed? Where are you being listed? Are you being listed repeatedly. So some services will self timeout after a day or two. So you may see you get listed time after time after time. And then obviously, the types of less so these are all different types of things to monitor and understand what the impact to your mailing reputation and to your domain reputation really is and how you need to come back and fix your reputation issues. Most recently, from the point of view of data, Verizon media has announced they're going to provide a new data feed. This is a paid service that Verizon is rolling out. But what they're going to do is they're actually going to give back metrics directly to brands, or espys. Or services such as the the 250OK, service. And this is News, not everyone supporting it yet. In fact, I don't think anybody is supporting it yet. And if it is something to sort of just pay attention to so they're gonna start giving you feedback, direct feedback, number of messages you've sent that they delivered to the inbox, number of messages they sent that they delivered to the spam folder, number of messages that an error during delivery. So these are all different metrics that you can start to feed back into your programme to understand where you're potentially having problems. Now, I don't this isn't gonna come with user level data. It's gonna be like an aggregate. So it's gonna be more like the Google postmaster. feedback loops a bit more aggregated data a bit higher, higher level. But it will allow you to start to see the trends and will allow you to start to see changes. So if you see more messages going to the inbox than the spam folder, great, your reputation is pretty good. But if you start to see more message going to the spam folder than the inbox, you need to use that as an early warning to make changes and understand what's going on with your platform. Other things they're going to start to include, and I know this is a long list. But they're going to start to include things around engagement. So what they're monitoring in regards to people opening what they're monitoring in regards to people deleting people starving people saving in a folder, people looking back at later, replying to a messages, spam complaints, all of these different types of things, they're going to start providing this from the actual user point of view on the Verizon media platform. So this is anyone at AOL, Yahoo, or Yahoo branded domain, as well as Verizon. So if you're, you're mailing a significant universe of people at these domains, this is going to be something to pay attention to. And it's going to be something that you're going to want to start looking at in regards to, how do I get ready to ingest this when Verizon is ready to start sending it to me. So this is sort of future thinking, that will give you a lot of data that will help you understand your performance and your metrics, and hopefully allow you to really see if there's problems or how healthy your programme is, obviously, delivery tools. So there's lots of delivery tools to to look at. You know, 250, okay has been around for a while we were most recently acquired by validity, which last year also required a required return path. But there are other deliverability tools out there as well. But looking into that, you know, these tools operate in a way to help you measure where messages are going, are they going to the inbox, are they going to a spam folder, are they simply never arriving at a domain. So maybe indicating there's a block, these can be used in a variety of different manners to proactively test before your campaign, they can be used to test during campaign deployment that can be used to test post campaign deployment, there's really no right way or wrong way to use these other than if you're, you're not using them, I would say it's probably the wrong way. But again, a lot of mail platforms are doing this on your behalf. So talk to your team, figure out what tools you think will work best for you. And start incorporating this into your your solution. Sometimes they'll also provide proactive monitoring your IPS and your blacklist your demands against blacklisting give you an early warning should something happen, allow you to have time to adjust and react. So it's not something that you send your next campaign. And all of a sudden your bounce rate triples, and you're like what happened? And then you look and you say, Oh, I was blocked, and I didn't know. So this, these tools allow you to get feedback to say, Yes, you've been blacklisted. You need to pay attention to this, fix this before your next delivery, your next campaign, you may be able to get more detailed analytics. So there are you know, base analytics that your ESP gives you a lot of delivery tools offer advanced analytics, maybe right down to the type of device, people are reading email on how long they're reading emails for, which gives you an indication of the quality of the message. So if someone's only looking at a message for two, three seconds, you know, they're not really engaging. But if someone's reading your message for 20 seconds, then there's certainly something that you provided that was valuable to that consumer. There are all kinds of different ways to clean your list. There are different things to look at. Obviously, I always like to look at engagement date. So last time a consumer engaged. But there are tools out there as well, that will help hygiene, you know, not necessarily hygiene out spam traps, because I don't think any of the the list hygiene services really do a good job of that personally. But, you know, from the point of view of hygiene in your list, say when was the last time someone opened, when was the last time someone clicked? If you look at that and say you know, 30 6090 180 days, 365 days, and you're getting a pretty big universe of people that aren't opening emails in that time period, you should look at either re engaging them or sunsetting them completely. There are other things that also impact that, you know, Canada's anti spam legislation, for example, requires any Implied Consent is only valid for 24 months. So at a minimum, you know, when I talk to clients, especially those here in Canada, 24 months is your upper bracket. But, you know, somewhere in between 30 days and 24 months, that's where you're gonna find a sweet spot for targeting people for sunsetting targeting people for removal from your list or targeting people with reengagement campaigns to say, you know, are you still there? Are you still interested? There are, you know, predeployment solutions to allow you to look at rendering across multiple platforms. There are several of those out there as well. In regards to, you know, what is my message going to render like outlook? What is it going to render render, like a Gmail. So these types of things. Also, you know, several of these will tell you what tab did this message go to Gmail, so that it go to the promotions tab that go to the social tab, that it go to the primary tab is that the expected tab that you would expect your messages to go? I would say that all of those tabs are still the inbox. So if you're worried that it go to the promo tab versus the primary tab, it's still the inbox. If consumers aren't using the webmail or the Gmail app they're using, say, their Android mail, or they're using Outlook or they're using Apple Mail. those platforms don't understand tabs, it's just inbox. So again, going back to understanding where your consumers are engaging with your mail should tell you how aggressive you need to think about things like tabs. A lot of them also offer. That is cool. What tool do you use to find out where email landed on a gmail tab? So that's a that's a core feature of the the 250OK, platform. So we monitor tab deployment, tab placement, when messages come in. Honestly, I don't know if the other platforms do that as well, I believe some of them do. So again, if you're looking for tools, certainly talk to the various providers and ask them if they're monitoring tab placement. So, you know, I just I know for a fact that our tools do that. And I believe some of the others do, as well. But off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you which ones do that. So offer additional services, so that some of them you know, we'll look at managing feedback loops and taking that data processing it, providing feedback in regards to where complaints are coming from which platforms are sending the most platform around postmaster tool integration, demark denee, email validation. So these platforms sort of work alongside your email vendor. And that's what really makes them important and powerful is because they're working alongside your email vendor, they're giving you additional insight and additional data to look at, and really make sure that your programme is healthy, and that it's doing the right things and what you're expecting. If something goes sorry, another question here, if something goes horribly wrong, on one sub domain, will it impact delivery reputation on other sub domains that same share the same top level domain? So the answer to this one is it depends. And, really, it depends on how bad things go. For the most part, you're going to see individual domains managing individual reputation, individual IPS, managing individual reputation. Now, if things go really sideways, and you're doing things in a really aggressive or really sort of spammy way, we have seen reputation bleed into other subdomains, into other IPS, and into sort of organisational level domain. So to say it won't happen would be wrong, but to say that it happens all the time is also inaccurate. So this is really sort of that sliding scale, where if you ignore problems for long enough, yes, it will get worse for you. But if you notice problems on an individual sub domain and start to make changes, then you will see that reputation is typically limited to just that sub domain. But that's, again, will vary based on mailbox provider will based on reputation list and spam filter list. But for the most part, they're mad, they're measured independently. But certainly, there are some that will bleed over. Just gotta I think I only have a few minutes left. So I want to make sure that I get through the rest of these. If you're not doing these things. Now, certainly make sure you're authenticating. basic authentication has been around for well over a decade, so spam, SPF decom, and feedback loops. Some more advanced things to definitely take care of setting up TLS, demark and bimi. These work together really well to really well to help build your domain reputation protect your brand from being spoof protect your brand from being attacked by others. Does bimi as it's already implemented, so bimi is implemented currently only at Yahoo. And that's available through the Yahoo web interface and the mail client. There are several other ISP that have signed on to the bimi working group which you can see Meet group.org. And those include Gmail, fast mail. Comcast is part of that group as well. So there are other platforms looking to implement these things. And as it stands right now, I did see today that someone mentioned that fast metal is now implementing bimi checks into their their headers. But I do not believe they're displaying it yet in the UI. So that would be new. Like I said, I just found out about that today. But they have joined the group. So that's, that's great in regards to, you know, seeing adoption and seeing implementation. So and I know there are a few others that are not yet announced. And unfortunately, I cannot announce them. So pay attention to me group, Steve, thanks for sharing the link, how email works. So everyone always thinks email goes from a to b. But email really goes through a whole number of different checks and a whole number of different things to get from your mail servers to the consumers. So we're looking at things like firewalls and unencrypted encrypted traffic, we're looking at demark and feedback loops and email authentication, then you have corporate spam filters, you have user level spam filters, and then you get feedback from all of these different locations. And this doesn't even include things like clicks and opens, this is just the technology of getting mail from site a to site B. As well as you know, understanding where you know, spoofing and phishing. And all of these types of things all play into the process, understanding all of these different things. demark, I'm a big proponent of demark. I love it, I think the feedback and the data you get from the demark really helps, even at a nun policy. So this is a nun policy allows you to receive information from ISP without actually impacting any type of delivery of your message. It requires either SPF, or DKIM, or both to properly function. So if you're not doing those three things, or two of those three things, certainly look at implementing them across the board where you can demark has really sort of ramped up over the years. Last year, these numbers came from demark.org, which has been tracking the number of domains and we're now tracking around 2 million domains, implementing demark to help protect their consumers and their brands. So this is sort of the last piece you know, really around how do you resolve so first off, you need to identify, go back to the root cause. So these are the different pieces I've talked about. So monitoring, looking at your data root cause Where did the bad data come from escalating. And I always say use the proper escalation path. You know, I'm not picking up the phone to call my postmaster friend, to say, hey, help me, I'm actually going to their web forum and filling up the form to say, I have a problem. If things don't get identified and fixed properly, yes, then I will say, you know, maybe call and help. Here's my ticket, those types of things, but only when that's absolutely necessary. Oftentimes, changing practices is necessary to resolve issues, especially when it's something that's problematic and reoccurring. And then once you've been able to make those changes, you'll typically see an improvement and a change in your reputation and hopefully a resolution to your issue. So I believe I'm right on time, or maybe a minute or two over. If there are any more questions. I'm here for a couple minutes until Nely tells me otherwise. Or you can you can reach out to anyone here at 250OK, using the info at or you can find me on Twitter, or email geeks as emailkarma. All right. Well, thanks very much, everyone. Like I said, please feel free to reach out direct if you have questions, and I know that they're making the recordings available sometime after the event happens. So I will see you all out there. Cheers. Be safe. About: Matthew Vernhout

With almost two decades of experience in email marketing, I am an industry veteran leveraging my background in privacy and network operations to help my clients improve their digital marketing programs. Which includes a deep understanding of ISP policies, email authentication, email deliverability and the legal requirements of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and PIPEDA. As well as holding a professional designation as a Certified Information Privacy Professional (Canada) since 2008.