The Hidden World of ISP Relations: Reputation, Removals, and Inbox Trust

Foreign. Welcome to Email After Hours by SenderScore. Powered by validity. We're your hosts. My name is Guy Hanson. And I'm Danielle Galant. And this is Email After Hours. Today we're diving into one of the most misunderstood and most important areas of email marketing, and that is ISP relations. So behind every successful sender program are the people that are working behind the scenes with mailbox providers and block lists and industry groups, God bless them, to keep email flowing and sender reputations intact. That's right. And joining us today we have Tara Nathanson, manager of ISP relations at Constant Contact, where she has spent more than two decades helping senders navigate deliverability, authentication, and mailbox provider expectations. She's also chair of the Platform and Infrastructure priority committee at Morgue, one of the most respected industry organizations in our world and highly focused on messaging, security, and abuse prevention. Tara, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you with us today. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here this morning, after hours, wherever you are. And before we get into everything today, we always want to start with something a little bit fun. You've had the same job title since 2003. That might be an industry record. What is the story behind that? And have you ever been tempted to finally change your job title, and if so, what too? Well, I started at habeas back in 2003. It was my second job in the Internet email industry. And I started with Ann Mitchell at Habeas, hired me, and I think I was like the sixth or seventh employee at Habeas. And we were really just kind of making it up as we went along. And so she hired me and then she said, what do you want your job title to be? I said, I don't know, what should it be? She said, well, I'm going to have you reach out to ISPs and maybe set up relationships. Back then we called them ISPs because they actually provided Internet connectivity to the mailboxes that they were providing service to. So she said, I want you to set up relationships and work out issues when they come up and maybe be an advocate for our customers. And so we're like, well, ISP relations seems right. And then at my next job, it was. It was somewhat similar work at Constant Contact, so they just wanted to just keep the same title. I've been here now for 21 years at constant Contact, same title, and it's become a bit of a joke at this point. That's outstanding. I love it. So let's use that as our starting point, talking about ISP relations, because I feel like it's a title that many people might have heard or thought they've heard, but maybe less sort of fully understand. And I think a quick word to our listeners, because when we talk about ISP Internet Service provider and our language at Validity, we frequently refer to mailbox provider. And the two are interchangeable, I guess. So tell us, Tara, what does a typical day in the life of an ISP relations manager actually look like? Well, these days I wear a lot of hats. I look at graphs and charts and inbox metrics to monitor the health of our shared IP infrastructure and domain reputation. If there's a block on our IPs or a problem with our reputation issues with major mailbox providers, I'm usually the one that's submitting a ticket or doing an escalation. That's only one of my hats. I also represent our company to a few different industry working groups where I take that valuable feedback and info that I take that back to our product team and we talk about new features or things that our customers may not even know that they need yet. I also work with a lot of internal teams on new products, new enhancements to make sure they fall in line with all the best practices. And most recently, I've been doing a lot of work to bring a large number of company domains into DMARC compliance, which is a big hurdle at the moment. But one of the big things about being at a company this long is having so much institutional knowledge. So I end up doing a lot of troubleshooting for very weird, strange problems that nobody even remembers why or how we built that part of the product. And in our, like, initial conversations before we were. Before recording and we wanted to figure out exactly what we're going to talk about. You mentioned that your role used to involve, like, a lot more conferences and that relationship building and even like the occasional beer with some of the mailbox providers, because there are people there. How. How has that evolved over the last 20 years? It definitely used to involve a lot more of that. I mean, it still involves beer, but it definitely used to. When I started attending MOG in 2005, I think there were very few senders or even vendors there. It was mostly ISPs, mailbox providers. There were definitely a lot of like, hey, that's the person from aol. I'm going to go introduce myself. I'm going to ask them about this problem that I have. It was great. And at first I got a lot of problems solved that way. But it really became apparent that this wasn't going to scale. So after one poor Yahoo employee was followed into the bathroom by a sender to explain their business model, we had to get folks to kind of reel it in. They listened to the senders and they realized that we weren't just trying to sneak our spam through their filters, that we were working to try and prevent it ourselves, that, you know, we were kind of on the same team. We didn't want the spam to go out just as much as they didn't want to receive the spam. So from those early discussions, things like feedback loops and postmaster pages evolved, which led to email best practices. Let's write down what we should do. Let's see if the ISPs agree with us. We also talked a lot about what you, what you're going to do with that data, what do you do with those feedback loops and things like that in general. So at MOG, we do spend a lot of time writing BCPs and getting buy in from the ISPs on how they feel about all that. Outstanding. So for the benefit of marketers who are listening, who have not worked with somebody in a role like yours, where do you create the most value for your customers? It's interesting. We have a unique thing at Constant Contact, where our customers are very, very small. They're small businesses, micro businesses, nonprofits and associations. These are the centers that don't often have a marketing department and they certainly don't have someone that's going to look into why their mail didn't get delivered. So that's where my team and our compliance group comes in. We do this part for our customers or we point them in the right direction when we think the problem is going to be on their side to deal with content. So that's our big role there. A hero, honestly. And what, like, what are the most common challenges that you have to solve or that customers are asking you to help solve? The biggest challenge for the customers and for me is can you get me out of the junk folder? That's a big one and not one that I usually handle day to day anymore. We have, we have other teams that kind of work with the customers on that sort of thing. But it's always a challenge when we know that we, the email service provider are doing everything right technically on the back end, like authentication and volume limits. And it's likely something that the customer is doing that's causing the mail to go to the junk folder. The most challenging part is that I don't have a magic wand or a secret person that I can call to fix every problem. The sender or customer is going to have to do a lot of the work themselves to re engage people in their email. So sometimes it just involves coaching them on how to do that. You're in the right place, preaching to the choir. And just because it's a long storied career across it, what's the most outrageous or memorable thing that's ever happened to you professionally? You've got to have a good story. One of the most memorable things for me was early, early on in my career when I think I worked for. This was before Habeas. I worked for Genuity, which is used to be BBM Planet GT Internetworking Genuity, then got bought out by Exo Communications. Anyway, I was at an MIT spam conference really early on, like many, many years ago. And there were graduate students writing thesis, their thesis on Bayesian filtering and doing presentations and, and you know, a lot of it was academics there. But I, we went, we were a backbone provider. I was on the abuse team. So we went to try to listen to what people were doing there and we all had badges on. And this person approached me and they basically offered me money to get my mail delivered across their network. They said to me, you know, come on, I can, I can do this under the table. If you look the other way, we're a customer of your, of your provider. Can you just please. And I said, no, I'm sorry, that's not going to work. I can't, I cannot do that for you. And they were like, I understand you probably just, you know, an underling is your. Can I speak to your boss? And I said, yeah, he's actually right here. And so like, my manager at the time came up and it was the, you know, one of the managers in the security operations department because we didn't have a whole compliance group. And the guy gave his whole spiel to that and, you know, offering to literally dump a boatload of money into my front yard. And we had to just say no. And at the time that was something that people referred to as pink contracts. Not really sure. But, you know, and I came home and I told my husband, he's like, we could retire. Wow. I bet you were like pinching yourself after that, you know, like, did that really just happen? Exactly. You sent me off down memory lane there when you were talking about Bayesian filtering. And I was sort of thinking back to sort of me doing Computer Science 101 at college. And man, I'm dating myself knowing what it's all about. Anyhow, back to today's topic. So when a sender hits a serious deliverability issue, I guess from our experience, mine and Danielle's, too many assume that they should contact Gmail or Yahoo or Microsoft directly. Get it sorted out. Is this the best approach? Is it even possible? What's your guidance for marketers who actually do want to engage with a mailbox provider themselves to get their problem sorted out? I always say step one is make sure you're not actually doing something spammy. Like look, do some self reflection. Put yourself in the recipient's mailbox. You know, if you're having delivery issues it's usually because the mailbox provider has received signals from, from the recipients that they don't want or that they don't like or that they aren't engaging with your mail. So you know, you need to ask yourself why. Maybe you can look at your unsubscribe comments. There's a lot of other signals you can look at besides this block. But then look at bounce messages. If your mail is bouncing, the big providers usually give some great information about why they bounce the message. So if you're using an email service provider it might be best to talk to them first in case the issue is actually with their infrastructure. It may be due to a different customer on their system. Like if you're on a shared IP environment, it could be that the IP is blocked and it's not necessarily your fault, it could be somebody else's fault. So I would definitely first look at yourself second, talk to your email service provider and then third if they advise you to reach out. So if you decide to reach out, do it through their postmaster page. A lot of smaller ISPs will have a contact us form that you can use. But you know, always make sure to approach it. Approach the blockless provider or the mailbox provider by asking them to confirm what the problem is and never just you know, don't demand they fix this problem because if you, if you know you got to, you have to approach it as if you, you messed up and you need to, you need to fix this problem. So I love that. Step one is self reflection and contrition Email Zen, you know, sort of think about what you've done. And I, you mentioned, you mentioned the tools and we've already talked about or touched on at a really high level how those have evolved over the years. Mailbox providers have like introduced more and more sender facing tools and enhanced those tools. Over the years. Gmail Postmaster Tools is currently in another iteration and being expanded upon Yahoo. Sender Hub. So for marketers and for senders, how valuable are these tools and how should marketers be making the most of the data that's in there? For marketers, if you're sending from your own domain, these tools can be valuable in confirming that you are actually having a problem or if you're working towards fixing the problem, they confirm that you're moving the needle. Most of the data in them is aggregated. However, they aren't going to tell you exactly what the problem is. They're not going to tell you exactly who is complaining and exactly what you did wrong. But they're a measurement, they're a place to look. You know, you think you're having issues, you look at Google Postmaster and go, oh yeah, look, it's got, the reputation's bad and there are steps you can take to improve the reputation. Then you go back and you look and you can see, okay, it's gone from bad to medium now that's great. And you know that you're in the right, you're moving the needle in the right direction. So they're really, they're valuable in that sense where you know, you can use them as a, as a meter in addition to the mailbox providers. You also, in your course of your job work with some of the major block list operators as well. So think the likes of Spam House Spam cop others in that kind of space. What are the most common reasons that legitimate senders get listed with organizations like those Today, a legitimate sender will find themselves on a block list for a few reasons. The most common one I find these days, especially if they're really a good legitimate sender, is having an insecure single opt in signup form. We're seeing a lot of instances with bots submitting garbage to forms they don't have captcha, they don't have double opt in on and eventually they're going to hit a trap and get themselves listed. Fortunately, Spam House is usually pretty good about knowing that's why you landed in their net and they'll explain that on the listing page. The second biggest reason I see for a legit sender and I'm going to keep it saying legitimate sender to get on on a list is old or stale lists. If you're not removing your bounces, they're going to turn into spam traps. You know, after a while a domain goes offline and a trap operator will buy it up condition it for a few years and then turn it into a spam trap. So if you're not removing bounces, that's going to get you, especially if you've been sending for a lot of years. Absolutely right. And if a sender does get listed and they want to engage with SpamHouse or SpamCop or the others to get delisted, what should they do first? Is your guidance similar to what we heard from you just now in terms of how to engage with the mailbox providers? And is there anything they should absolutely avoid doing as part of those interactions? Following people into the bathroom? That won't work. Don't be rude. And don't blame the block list provider, even if you do think they messed up, because you're the greatest center in the world. If you're listed, there's usually some reason. So don't be rude, don't blame. Try to figure out what that reason is, be humble about it and fix the issue, and then ask for forgiveness. That's. That's my advice all the time. It's good advice, especially when dealing with spam owls, because you know when you're saying a D list request, there's a human on the other side of that mailbox. And you know if you're angry and you type it out and it comes through in that, that person's usually volunteer, that's, you know, you don't need to be mean to humans. We had Sree on the podcast a while ago guy, and I think it was that episode where he spoke about also how sometimes it's a very canned response, like you can tell a Claude or a ChatGPT has written the removal request. Was that the. I remember him telling us that. And suddenly they were seeing like a whole different quality of tickets coming into them, but they're all so remarkably similar, too. That's interesting, Tara. You work closely with your product teams internally at constant contact. So how does someone in your position influence product development and make sure that the new features that your team are working on are aligning with best practices and what email marketers actually need? Well, it's great. This is an area of my job where my time at MOG really comes in handy. Being in the room discussing what is and isn't a best practice with the mailbox providers and the vendors out there. It really gives me the confidence to tell the product team that what I'm saying is accurate and not just something that I'm guessing at. My favorite thing is when a new practice or rule think of the sender Requirements from Yahoo and Google recently, new things like that. They come from mog. I hear about them first at mog, and then I can go back to the team at the office and tell them what's on the horizon and we really better get ready. We better focus some efforts this direction so that we're not caught unaware at the end of it all. And I imagine there might even be times where your product team's really excited. They want to launch something that they're seriously keen about, and then you have to be the voice of reason going, not unless we can do it responsibly. Does that happen at all? Yes, I mean, it definitely happens way more often than I'd like to admit. The reality is that there are a lot of quick and easy ways to make a buck and to get ahead. Right now, many of these are things that are, you know, they're openly advertised, so marketers and product teams think that they must be okay. But fortunately they check in with my team first and we sort out the ethical way to do things more often than not. You know, my. My job involves sorting out the complications of authentication. Maybe they've got a new stream of mail for a new product type. So I'm working with them to. To with that type of stuff to get things set up correctly. You know, the real boring stuff. That's what I spend a lot of my time. Boring to who? Yeah, you're speaking to some geeks here. And there have been like no shortage of major changes in email, especially, I think, over the last couple of years. Privacy shifts, changing metrics, tighter filtering. And I know it keeps me up at night, but which developments are you most excited about and then which worry you the most? The most exciting thing to me has been the Yahoo, Google enforcing email authentication. I've known it's a best practice for years. We've had it incorporated into our product for years, but really pushing people to do it had been an uphill slog. It's been difficult. So, you know, knowing something is a best practice and being forced to do it in order to send mail are two very different things. So having that become a requirement really pushed our customers to do what we'd wanted them to do for years. My biggest worry these days really is the loss of data. Things like feedback loops and open rates and not having access to that data is what scares me the most. It's because we grow Hyatt on that. And picking up on that last point because I think you also mentioned it in our prep call. You know, this idea that the loss of insights as a result of some of these new developments is becoming a real challenge. And what's your thoughts in terms of how email marketers need to be adapting when some of the traditional signals and feedback and data points that they've relied on historically are disappearing? I don't have a one size fits all answer for that. Losing opens means you don't know who engaged. So my suggestion for that is to have more calls to action in your email, have other ways to get people to interact with your mail. But some senders are really purely informational and they don't traditionally have a link to click. They're just sending information to their user base out. So that dwindling feedback, the dwindling feedback loops are, are also a concern because they're a direct message from the recipient letting us know that the recipient didn't like something. So losing that is difficult. We've relied on that data for so long. I think most marketers aren't willing to try and find new ways to get at this data. So I say be open to new ideas, think outside the box and find new ways to get recipients to engage with your messages so that they can tell you what they think about your mail and you can take that and iterate. Great. I wonder if you could wave a magic wand and make life easier for sender teams like overnight, what would you ask mailbox providers for? Would it be better postmaster pages, better bounce codes, better support channels? Like, what are the biggest opportunities for improvement? Maybe as far as the senders are concerned across the ecosystem. Well, you hit the three biggest nails right there on the head. We try really hard to keep our customers from spamming and doing bad things. But when they do make it through, when bad stuff gets through, we have to rely on the mailbox providers to let us know what went wrong. And the difficult thing here is we, the esp, we're not their customer. We don't pay that mailbox provider anything. So asking them for better postmaster tools, more unified bounce codes, and please answer my support requests, those are a big ask. So that's where I would use my wand is giving the mailbox providers unlimited resources to make tools to make my life better. And easier. But you know, unfortunately that's, that's just not the way. That's why it's a magic wand. I wish I could wave my magic wand to keep this conversation going at least another half an hour because it's been such fun. But the we do need to start wrapping up and I'm going to. Luckily, we opened up with a quick fire question for you, Tyro. We're going to close out with one as well. So. So as we've heard in today's conversation, you've spent decades helping senders stay out of trouble. Let's end with that. Is there one thing that most marketers still underestimate about email deliverability? I would say that my biggest thing is reputation is easy to lose and really, really hard to gain back. So don't never underestimate how close you are to the edge at any given moment of doing something that's going to get you in trouble. Always think about the person who's receiving your mail and respect their inbox. Like would you want 20 emails in one week reminding you about that sale? Probably not. So that's exactly the type of thing that's going to get you into trouble if you do it to your recipients. Hear, hear. And no, I don't want walk a mile in your customer's shoes. Yeah. Tara, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your experience from truly the front lines of sender reputation, ISP relations and industry collaboration. So if our listeners would like to connect with you or learn more about your work, what's the best way that they can reach out to you? I'm on LinkedIn, you can find me there. I'm always happy to answer questions and chat with people there. Amazing. And to our listeners, be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe so that you don't miss future episodes. And don't Forget to visit senderscore.org for more resources to help you become a stronger sender. That's right. And final word from my side. Danielle and I love our guests who join us on email after hours. We're always looking out for great new guests to feature on future episodes too. So if any of you out there listening today would like to join us for an upcoming episode, drop us a comment, ping us on LinkedIn, fill out the guest form that's linked to the show notes. We'd love to have you here at some stage in the year to come. Thanks for listening. We'll see you all again next time in two weeks time. Bye for now. Be sure to tune in next time and hit subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. And don't Forget to visit sendascore.com for loads more great resources to help you become a strong descender to all you sleep ascenders out there. Thank you for joining us after hours and see you next time.