The Peculiar Challenges of APAC Deliverability

Tunc Bolluk 0:33
Well, good morning everyone and welcome to our session today. My name is Tunc Bolluk and I head up the APAC region here at Validity. And I'm also joined by two industry experts to share their insights on everything to do with email deliverability anti fraud and specific challenges that email senders face here in APAC. If we have if we've got some time at the end, we may even carve out a bit of a section to take some questions from the audience, but we'll see how we go. So on to our experts. So first up, we've got Toshiaki Onishi are better known as Toshi than spam exterminator anti spam and email deliverability career back at Websense and he has been in the fight against spam, email and email borne threats for over 15 years. There was even one of the one of the praise professionals to identify some of the world's very first phishing scams. He currently leads the deliverability efforts here in APAC for digital helping centres both on the strategy and deliverability side for best practice, so welcome, Toshi. Make it. And my next guest is our very own Sridhar, trench rendering, or distri, for short, and he's one of our top senior strategists at EA here at berluti. He's got over 14 years of experience in the industry. And he started his email career as a postmaster at good ol AOL. He spent a lot of time fighting email abuse and email fraud, but at the same time fighting to ensure legitimate senders are not penalised, and actually reached that all important inbox. So I'm really pleased to have you as well with a shrink.

Toshiaki Onishi 2:27
Thanks.

Tunc Bolluk 2:30
So guys, let's, let's kick off with our first topic. And, you know, looking at our theme of deliverability and our specific challenges here in here in APAC, you know, Toshi, let's start with you. What are some of the key items that you found that that affect deliverability, across the different countries, which are quite sparse across APAC, and the different mailbox providers that you found?

Toshiaki Onishi 2:57
Children. So in Asia Pacific, there are many countries, many regions, and each country and region has its own unique eco system, as you will be aware, and each ecosystem is going to bring each of its unique challenges. So what I found through my experience is that in APAC region, most of the time, it can be narrowed down to two factors. One is actually technical. And the other one is legal slash privacy. And in terms of technical, what we've found is that certain countries focus on engagement. And certain countries actually focus on other, more technical requirements, or limitations, if you want to call them. And so legal and privacy, each region, each country is going to have its own rules, the level of enforcement is going to be different. So from there, again, that's another, I guess, peculiar challenge that we see in Asia Pacific, when we're actually sending email.

Tunc Bolluk 4:06
Especially Have you got some examples of of the countries and what what are some of the procure peculiarities using?

Toshiaki Onishi 4:13
Sure. So in Australia, a typical b2c mailing list looks similar to what you would see in the US or in Europe, where the bulk of the mailing list is going to be made up of the big players like Gmail, Microsoft, and Verizon. Australia is very similar to that in terms of its composition. So if you're going to try and send something in Australia, then the user engagement is going to be the key element to success. However, if you look at certain countries, like Japan, for example, engagement is still important, but not as much compared to say Australia, because the mailbox providers over there would actually focus more on say, connection limits So you need a certain number of IPS to send, you need to set a certain speed limit to send things like that, which to be honest with you, I don't think it exists, or if not, it's probably applied sparsely in Australia. So that's one unique element when you're trying to send to Japan. That's just an example.

Tunc Bolluk 5:28
Yeah, yeah. It's a really good point. And Sri, what about yourself? What have you done about the differences with the countries and other providers out here?

Sridhar Chandran 5:38
Yep, so completely agree with the observations Arthur, she made. So if you look at the b2c side, it's heavily skewed towards your Gmail and particularly example of India, there was a report recently, about more than 70% of mailboxes are hosted at gmail. So there's some interesting facts around that. So if you look at China, it's a lot more regional over there. So you have the, and again, China has a completely different ecosystem compared to the rest of the world. So and again, I see, at least recently that a lot more free free mail or webmail providers are dominant, getting down in APAC and the regional ISP or telcos, if you say, their shares reducing, but having said that, we should have a great balance between say IP reputation and a domain reputation. So when I say that IP reputation, that is what Toshi mentioned about your connection limits, and so on, your volume plays a really important role on how much males can make to your inbox. And but at the same time, you have to adapt to new technologies like say, just to make sure you have your engagement in place