Summary
Email receivers, primarily Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Mailbox Providers (MBPs), face a constant balancing act. They are pressured from internal stakeholders, such as marketing and sales teams, to ensure legitimate emails from their own organization reach the inbox. Concurrently, they are pressured by users to block unwanted spam and phishing attempts. This dual pressure creates a complex environment where receivers must implement sophisticated filtering mechanisms while remaining responsive to internal business needs.
Key findings
- Conflicting Demands: Receivers must satisfy two opposing forces: users who demand zero spam and internal teams who want maximum deliverability for their own outgoing mail.
- Internal Pressure: Internal marketing and sales departments frequently pressure postmasters and IT teams to relax filters or whitelist certain senders to ensure their campaigns are delivered.
- User Experience: The core mission of a receiver is to optimize the user experience by delivering wanted email and blocking unwanted email, a task that becomes harder with increasing email volume and sophistication of spam.
- Empathy Gap: There’s often a lack of understanding between senders and receivers regarding the challenges each side faces, leading to frustration and miscommunication.
- Reputation Impact: Receiver systems heavily rely on sender reputation (and IP reputation) to make filtering decisions, making it crucial for senders to maintain good sending practices.
Key considerations
- Balancing Act: Receivers constantly adjust their spam filters and algorithms, striving for a balance that minimizes false positives (legitimate emails blocked) and false negatives (spam reaching the inbox).
- Authentication Standards: Robust implementation of authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC helps receivers verify legitimate senders and reduces the pressure to block wanted mail. Higher Logic's documentation on Gmail and Yahoo's new requirements for bulk senders emphasizes this.
- Engagement Metrics: Mailbox providers heavily weigh engagement signals, such as opens, clicks, and replies, when deciding inbox placement. Positive engagement can influence a receiver to be less restrictive.
- Feedback Loops: Receivers offer feedback loops to senders, providing insights into complaint rates and other metrics that can help senders improve their practices and reduce unwanted mail, thereby alleviating receiver pressure.
- Communication and Empathy: Fostering better communication and empathy between email senders and receivers, as discussed in Dotmagazine's sender's and receiver's perspective article, is crucial for resolving conflicts and finding common ground.
What email marketers say
Email marketers often find themselves caught between aggressive business targets for email volume and the technical realities of deliverability imposed by email receivers. They perceive receiver filters as overly strict or opaque, leading to frustration when legitimate campaigns are blocked or land in spam folders. Marketers frequently advocate for greater transparency from ISPs regarding their filtering criteria and a more lenient approach to ensure marketing messages reach their intended audience.
Key opinions
- ISP opacity: Many marketers feel that ISPs and MBPs are not transparent enough about their filtering processes, making it difficult to diagnose and fix deliverability issues.
- Business objectives clash: There's a constant tension between marketing's goal to send more emails for business growth and deliverability teams or receivers who prioritize list quality and reputation.
- Unfair blocking: Some marketers believe that receivers are too quick to block or blacklist legitimate senders, even for minor infractions, impacting their ability to reach engaged subscribers. Learn more about managing senders during blacklisting events.
- User experience focus: Marketers are increasingly aware that recipient engagement is key to deliverability and are looking for ways to make their emails stand out in the inbox.
Key considerations
- List hygiene: Regularly cleaning email lists to remove unengaged subscribers and invalid addresses is paramount to improving sender reputation and avoiding blocklists.
- Audience control: Giving recipients more control over the emails they receive, such as clear unsubscribe options and preference centers, can reduce complaints and improve deliverability.
- Gradual scaling: For new domains or IPs, starting with smaller email campaigns and gradually increasing volume helps build a positive sender reputation with receivers, preventing throttling.
- Content quality: Focusing on valuable, relevant content for subscribers reduces the likelihood of spam complaints and helps ensure emails bypass filters. Understanding how complaint rates affect deliverability is essential.
Marketer from Email Geeks observes that conflicting feedback, where some users criticize spammers while others blame ISPs, illustrates a persistent and fundamental divide in perspectives within the email industry.
Marketer from Nutshell emphasizes that achieving high email deliverability means more messages reaching subscribers' inboxes, rather than getting trapped in spam filters or blocked by firewalls, which directly impacts campaign success.
What the experts say
Email deliverability experts highlight that receiver decisions are driven by a complex interplay of technical factors, user behavior, and internal policy. They understand that while senders feel their legitimate mail is unfairly blocked, receivers are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of malicious and unwanted traffic. Experts often advocate for strict adherence to email authentication standards, careful reputation management, and proactive monitoring to bridge the gap between sender aspirations and receiver capabilities.
Key opinions
- Default to block: Many experts agree that receivers operate on a principle of assume bad until proven good when it comes to incoming email, prioritizing user safety over sender convenience.
- Volume challenges: The massive volume of unsolicited and abusive email puts immense pressure on receivers to develop sophisticated filtering systems that are inherently aggressive.
- Reputation is king: A good sender reputation, built over time through consistent, positive sending practices, is the most effective way to gain trust with receivers. Our guide on recovering domain reputation provides more context.
- Authentication enforcement: Experts stress that proper implementation of authentication standards like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is no longer optional but a fundamental requirement for deliverability.
Key considerations
- Proactive monitoring: Senders should actively monitor their deliverability, track bounces, and check blocklists (or blocklists) to identify and address issues swiftly. This includes understanding what happens when your domain is blocklisted.
- Engagement optimization: Focusing on sending email only to engaged subscribers will naturally improve deliverability, as positive engagement signals are crucial to receivers.
- Understanding throttling: Senders need to understand that throttling is a legitimate tool receivers use to manage traffic and identify suspicious sending patterns, rather than a punitive measure. More on handling sending rate limits.
- Compliance with guidelines: Adhering to best practices and guidelines from major mailbox providers (like Gmail and Microsoft) is critical, as non-compliance will lead to stricter filtering. SpamResource provides continuous updates on these changes.
Deliverability Expert from SpamResource highlights that the fundamental mission of an email receiver is to ensure users receive all desired emails while effectively blocking all unwanted ones, a crucial and challenging task.
Deliverability Expert from Word to the Wise notes that email receivers face significant internal and external pressure to balance stringent spam filtering with the need to avoid blocking legitimate mail, including demands from internal marketing teams.
What the documentation says
Official documentation from email service providers and industry standards bodies (like RFCs) primarily focuses on technical specifications and best practices designed to ensure secure and efficient email delivery. This documentation outlines the protocols that help receivers distinguish legitimate mail from spam, such as authentication methods and traffic management. While not explicitly discussing 'pressure,' the very existence of these robust standards indicates the necessity for receivers to have clear rules to manage the massive influx of email and protect their infrastructure and users.
Key findings
- Authentication requirements: Documentation consistently emphasizes the critical role of strong email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) for senders to pass receiver checks.
- Engagement as a metric: Many provider guidelines indicate that positive user engagement (opens, clicks, low complaints) is a primary factor in deliverability, directly influencing receiver trust.
- Traffic management: Documentation often details policies around email sending rates, connection limits, and throttling, which receivers use to manage their infrastructure load and prevent abuse.
- Complaint processing: Official guidelines outline how user complaints are handled and their direct impact on a sender's reputation and subsequent deliverability. See our article on why recipients get complaints without DMARC.
Key considerations
- Adherence to standards: Compliance with published email standards (RFCs) and provider-specific guidelines is the most direct way to ensure mail is not unduly rejected or filtered by receivers.
- List management: Documentation often implies that responsible list management, including obtaining consent and promptly processing unsubscribes, is foundational to good sender hygiene and desired by receivers.
- Sender identification: Clear sender identification, through proper DNS records (like SPF and DKIM) and consistent sending domains, helps receivers accurately assess legitimacy.
- Monitoring deliverability: Many providers offer tools like Postmaster Tools, which provide senders with data on their deliverability and reputation, empowering them to respond to receiver signals proactively. This is essential for improving email deliverability.
Documentation from Higher Logic (referencing Gmail/Yahoo requirements) states that bulk senders are explicitly required to strongly authenticate their emails following established best practices such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for successful delivery.
Documentation from dotmagazine.online explains that from a receiver's perspective, their primary mission involves ensuring users receive all desired emails while preventing all unwanted ones from reaching the inbox, highlighting the critical filtering role.
