Your deliverability questions, answered (part 2)

In the first part of our AMA with deliverability expert Al Iverson, we covered list warming, sender reputation, and the myth of “spam words.”

This week, Iverson takes on the tough stuff: fixing a damaged domain, fighting spammy bad actors, and keeping your technical setup healthy.

If your organization’s email engagement has dipped or your year-end inbox placement is looking shaky — Iversons’s answers are worth bookmarking.

Q: I'm curious about rehabilitation—are there effective ways to “rehabilitate” a domain reputation after a deliverability hit? And do I still have time to repair my reputation before EOY?

Al Iverson: It’s almost always possible to rehabilitate your domain reputation!

If you had bad data and have expunged it, you’ve suppressed un-engaged subscribers, and the remainder of your list is truly opted-in and truly interested in your mail, you will get back to the inbox after a bit.

But that bit could be anywhere from 4-8 weeks. This used to be more reliably 4 weeks most of the time, but things have observably changed at Gmail, in particular, and rehab seems to be a bit of a slower process now.

Q: If I see a decline in engagement with a particular inbox provider, where might I look first to diagnose the problem?

Al: The devil’s in the details, as it often is. But the broad strokes guidance here is going to be to figure out if you have a list hygiene issue or bad data segment that you might want to stop sending to.

You’ll also want to look at potentially suppressing long-unengaged subscribers, either permanently or at least for a few months, to help boost engagement at that particular mailbox provider.

How easy this is varies by provider. At Gmail, which is generally the most forgiving mailbox provider overall, it can still take a number of weeks of improved sending before you see the benefit of improved inbox placement.

Microsoft can be a lot trickier, especially if you’re on shared IP infrastructure. Yahoo is somewhere in the middle of the two.

Q: The spammers and scammers are somehow still able to get through to inboxes — and their firehose volume drowns out the rest of us who actually respect email as a permission-based ecosystem.

If certain email providers won't enforce their terms of service on uploads, is there any way for us out here at the grassroots to shut down the bad actors?

Al: Some bad senders with squiffy email practices get through to the inbox, but a lot of them don’t. What drives spam folder placement (broadly) is low engagement and high spam complaint rates.

Hit the “report spam” button in the Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Outlook user interface. That’s the best thing you can do to signal that this particular mail is unwanted.

All of those “votes” matter and if enough negative reports are tallied, mail starts to get blocked or go to the spam folder.

If you really want to get fancy, you can try reporting mail directly to ESPs by looking up email platform domains in the headers, and then checking against the database at the Abuse.net website to see if they have a recommended address to forward spam reports to.

This involves sending the full email headers (from the view source/show original of the email message), and can get a bit tricky.

And the honest answer is, some platforms care about spam reports, and some don’t. So you can’t always expect a miracle.

Even if a platform takes your spam report seriously, they often need more information beyond your single spam report before they can suspend or terminate an email sending client.

Your report could be the first of many, or it could spur them to investigate the client’s practices and find that they’re non-compliant with published policies.

Q: How often should nonprofits review their SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configurations?

Al: As often as you can stand. My job at a DMARC service provider depends on it! (Just kidding.)

Honestly, I think it’d be good for anybody in charge of an email program to make a repeating calendar event for every January, maybe the second week or so, so after you’re back from holiday, and just starting a new year.

Review and test your email authentication configuration (along with other technical settings), and fix anything that looks to be amiss. The tester at aboutmy.email is great for this.

Q: What’s the impact of subdomains (like act.myorg.org vs. myorg.org) on deliverability?

Al: Historically, using different sending subdomains meant that you would be keeping reputation separate between the different mail streams.

This distinction has blurred over time, though, and now, Google, in particular, looks at domain reputation based on your overall domain.

There’s still some delineation of reputation, but if you’re doing something “bad enough” with a subdomain, it will eventually cause a negative reputation issue for the whole domain, affecting other mail streams and potentially even 1:1 organization or corporate email.

To me, this highlights that bad practices have been more and more risky over the years; their negative impact can and does often grow bigger now compared to five or ten years ago.

The bottom line
Rebuilding your domain reputation takes time, but it’s rarely impossible — and keeping your authentication, hygiene, and subdomain setups clean pays off all year.

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

'Til next time!
Sara

P.S. Looking to add donors to your email list before year-end comes knocking? See how Civic Shout can help.