Why Domain Reputation is the New IP Reputation | Matt Vernhout

In this episode, email deliverability expert Matt Vernhout joins the podcast to discuss essential insights into the current state of email delivery.

Matt emphasizes the importance of looking at campaign performance over time and the value of engagement metrics in maintaining a healthy email list. He shares historical and recent changes in email authentication standards such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and highlights their impact on improving email delivery.

The conversation covers major shifts in the industry, including the implementation of one-click unsubscribe mechanisms mandated by major email providers like Google and Yahoo, and the rise of generative AI’s role in both creating and filtering email content. Matt also talks about the tools and strategies new email services should adopt to mitigate abuse from day one. Looking ahead, he shares his hopes for the evolution of interactive email and improved security standards.

Listen here:

Watch here:

Read the transcript:

[00:00:00] Matt: People who look at a per campaign metric are almost looking at the wrong thing. You need to look at what has your campaign done this month, or your series of campaigns done this month in order to say, are things looking good? And again, you watch for that deviation of steady line decline. There’s your problem, what did you do three days before the decline?

[00:00:20] Ken: And this is the sort of thing you actually see as a deliverability consultant. 

[00:00:24] Matt: Yep, a hundred percent. Huh? They send you eight emails a week for 104 weeks and you don’t open or engage or any of those, you’re probably not interested. You wanted the 10% discount, so you signed up and then you ignored them for two years.

[00:00:36] Matt: Is that a valuable customer? And that’s where I talk to my customer. Where is your valuable customer at? How do you monitor that? How do you define that? And it’s different for every brand.

[00:00:53] Ken: Matt, Vernhout. Uh, it’s so great to have you on the podcast. Finally, um, now listeners won’t know that we’ve actually known each other since 2005, and can you guess the conference that we met at Matt, do you remember that far back? 

[00:01:09] Matt: Oh, I’m, I’m gonna put on the, it’s gonna be a mug, but I don’t know which one.

[00:01:14] Matt: Probably like, it actually wasn’t, it wasn’t a mug. Okay. No, 

[00:01:17] Ken: it, it was the, uh, it was the inbox conference. Interesting. In like San Jose. 

[00:01:23] Matt: Oh man, I forgotten about that conference. It’s been so long since that’s run. I know. 

[00:01:27] Ken: Yeah, that was a very email 1.0 conference, you know, at the very beginning of the industry at the dawn of time.

[00:01:35] Ken: Uh, and uh, but you’d be amazed how many people I still know in the industry who are still working in email, who went to that exact conference in 2005, 

[00:01:45] Matt: email’s, the Hotel, California. You can never, it is, you can check out, but you can never leave. Everybody I’ve talked to that’s sort of left. They all come back at some point, or, oh, you know, they do.

[00:01:56] Matt: They stay on the fringe because every business deals with email. 

[00:02:00] Ken: Yep, yep. And yeah, as someone, uh, told me many years ago, email is underappreciated as the most used application on the internet. You think of web browsing, forget it. I mean, email is the heart of everything that everybody does all day long, and it’s, and it probably always will be.

[00:02:18] Ken: Uh, well, let’s jump right into it. Um, so Matt, you’re working at Email Industries now. Uh, you’ve been a deliverability, uh, professional for a really long time, uh, since the dawn of the industry 25 years 

[00:02:33] Matt: this year. 

[00:02:34] Ken: Yeah. But, you know, for, for our audience, um. Who may not be as expert in this particular field.

[00:02:42] Ken: Uh, I wonder if we could start by, uh, talking about the current state of play in email delivery. Back in 2023, Google and Yahoo made their major changes with domain authentication. Uh, and what, where are things at today? What are the big issues? What are the, the changes afoot in the industry today that you’re noticing?

[00:03:03] Matt: Yeah, like if, if we want to go like way back in history for a second, right? Like 2003, I believe roughly is when SPF was first sort of announced, right? So we’re talking 20 plus years for the first sort of authentication standard to come out de Im followed five or six years later, call it 2010.

[00:03:25] Matt: Approximately. So that’s another 15 years in between we saw SPF and, or sorry, sender id. Um, and you know, a couple other things kind of come and go. Right. You might remember Good Mail, authentic, you know, stamped mail kind of stuff. Oh, I remember, right. So, yeah. Um, you know, we kind of have this threefold winner, if you will, right now with SPF De Kim and Dmar working in concert together.

[00:03:53] Matt: Um. So what we saw was in October, 2023, Google and Yahoo came together and did a joint announcement, which was actually, uh, I, I think, surprised a lot of people when you think like, okay, these are competitors, but at the same time they’re trying to do the same thing and together, you know, they’re anywhere from.

[00:04:12] Matt: 50 to 70% of a a marketer’s email list. So they basically said, look, we’re tired of unauthenticated mail. We’re gonna force you to do it. And they basically gave everyone, you know, six to nine months leeway to get authentication in order. But they also said, we also want list unsubscribe and we want, you know, these other features all thrown in at the same time, which was great.

[00:04:37] Matt: You know, the a six month runway for those types of things. Certainly helps brands and, and domain owners, you know, at least gives them time to figure it out. Um, and so that’s kind of where we are with sort of the. Flat, you know, the minimum requirements if you will. Um, after that happened, you know, Comcast has come on board, Apple’s come on board more recently, um, orange and, and says them have said they’re gonna come on board.

[00:05:04] Matt: Microsoft is probably the most recent of the big ones. Uh, they actually just came out with the deadline at the beginning of May and said, you know, they gave everyone sort of 30 days notice. Um, but to be fair. You’ve had 18 months to get ready, right? So 30 days notice was plenty for, for the majority of senders.

[00:05:24] Matt: Um. I think it, it had a big shift, right? You do a lot of filtering, right? And you do a lot of sending and, and your platforms. Mm-hmm. And I think authentication is a huge part of separating out, you know, the good stuff and the bad stuff, uh, when it comes to email. Um, and there’s a lot of bad stuff. So being able to have that signal to say, you know, the, the cream is rising to the top, and you can take that, you know.

[00:05:51] Matt: Three, 4% of mail that’s actually legitimate and not malicious. Uh, and then run that through your filters and deliver maybe the 1% that’s really [00:06:00] good to the inbox and the other 3% to the junk folder. 

[00:06:04] Ken: Yeah, we’re, we’re seeing definitely a positive impact, uh, from my perspective. Uh, you know, doing email delivery for the web hosting industry.

[00:06:12] Ken: Uh, our, our big challenge is that we have tens of millions of end users, many of whom, most of whom are, are not technically sophisticated users. Their, uh, websites are constantly getting hacked and taken over, uh, and abused to send out mail. Uh, and until the domain changes went into effect at Google and Yahoo, we couldn’t really rely on the domain names as a source of reputation.

[00:06:39] Ken: I. Because it was easy to spoof domains there. You know, people weren’t giving you a reliable authentication of the domain that they were sending from. But with these changes now, when you see a domain, if it’s sending out any volume of traffic that you care to deliver, you know it’s going to be doing the right things With respect to DA and SPF and, and, uh.

[00:07:00] Ken: Having a good DAC record. Um, and so that is making a difference. Uh, I would say IP addresses are less important than they used to be for filtering. Uh, I imagine that is probably the main reason why, uh, the big receivers made this change. 

[00:07:16] Matt: Absolutely. And I think, you know, we look at. The finite number of IP four space left, right?

[00:07:23] Matt: I know the almost infinite amount of IP six space, you can’t measure reputation on that many ips and IPV six. So looking at domain reputation was the requirement basically forcing everyone to do it. Not to say that IP reputation’s non-existent because some mailbox providers still rely on it. They haven’t made that switch yet, but the.

[00:07:48] Matt: Incorporation of D. Along with SP, F and D Im have really sort of pushed the envelope towards that for sure. 

[00:07:57] Ken: Right. So, uh, you mentioned unsubscribes, uh, in, in, in the sort of intro section we’re, we’re all email receivers, right? Uh, the idea that you could click a button. At the top of your inbox and just unsubscribe from something.

[00:08:11] Ken: You know, that is a really novel thing that I, I’m starting to become used to. Mm-hmm. As a Gmail user and very happy with, uh, from the deliverability side. Um, how do you see the deployment of, uh, of more effective unsubscribe op uh, unsubscribe mechanisms such as one click unsubscribe? 

[00:08:27] Matt: Yeah. I think, you know, having done delivery consulting for so long, one of the key things I always talk with my customers about is.

[00:08:35] Matt: A clear and easy to execute unsubscribe, not only because it’s, it’s basically legally mandated around the world, the ability to stop communications when you want them to, but. If a consumer has a hard time finding out how to stop mail from you, there’s a button that makes it really easy in most email interfaces called the report, a spam button, right?

[00:08:58] Matt: Right. Or this is junk, or whatever the, the mailbox provider labels it as. So my thoughts have always been, make it easier for your consumer to say unsubscribe than it is for them to report to a spam, or at least as easy. Um, so this makes it one more step easier. Now there are lots of problems, like all things email, right?

[00:09:20] Matt: If you’re subscribed to six different lists, list unsubscribe by default unsubscribes you from one of the six, right? So it’s not always clear to the consumer. So you might get one unsubscribe and then five more spam complaints because the consumer’s, like I asked for this to stop. Mm-hmm. I mean, there’s, there’s certainly some challenges there.

[00:09:38] Matt: And then even like with transactional mail, typically it doesn’t have an unsubscribe. Consumers will report transactional mail with spam as well. So, you know, there are still challenges that need to be figured out in that regard. Um, but absolutely right there are, are positive signals for mailbox providers and there are negative signals.

[00:10:00] Matt: Unsubscribe is a positive signal, especially if you honor it. You want good reputation? You want good delivery? Honor your unsubscribes. Make them simple. Make them easy. Your life will be better for it. ’cause you’ll get less complaints. 

[00:10:15] Ken: Right. And that, and you want that. Especially because Google and Yahoo and, and now Microsoft have started to mandate low complaint rates, uh, on the domains that they process mail for.

[00:10:26] Ken: For. So if you have a high complaint rate associated with your domain, you’re simply not gonna get your mail through. Uh, right. And they’re being explicit about that as opposed to in the past when it was a little bit more cloak and dagger. Right. Yeah, it was, 

[00:10:38] Matt: we always said, you know, one per thousand is deliverability professionals.

[00:10:41] Matt: But it’s nice to have them come out and say like, one per thousand really is the ideal number, but there’s a little wiggle room, maybe three per thousand. But if you go above three per thousand, there’s certainly a problem. Right. So that Right. That really is, it’s either them listening to the industry and the advice that we’ve been giving customers for years, [00:11:00] or them recognizing that, eh, there’s a tiny bit of wiggle room in the middle there.

[00:11:06] Ken: Yeah. Now people, uh, typically think of, I mean, if you’re naive, if you’re new to the email sending world. Uh, you might think, okay, cool, I make a list. I pay attention to the unsubscribes. My job is done. Right? Uh, but I know that from our many conversations over the years at, at Moog events and elsewhere, uh, you have, uh.

[00:11:29] Ken: Long drummed into me and others, the importance of paying attention to how much engagement is going on with your lists. Uh, and is that still a really important thing for senders to pay attention to? Uh, so like, I guess what I’m seeing for, to make it really clear to the audience, uh, if you’re sending to a list of recipients.

[00:11:50] Ken: And they’re not clicking on stuff. If they’re not taking actions, like buying things in your store or whatever, you should probably stop mailing them. 

[00:11:58] Matt: Yeah. I mean, every, every business is a little different. Like some are just like, I just need to get it to the inbox. ’cause it’s, you know, it’s, it’s an important alert.

[00:12:06] Matt: It’s not something that I expect them to click on. It’s not something I expect them to read. Uh, but it’s an important message. For the individual. Um, you know, publishers are all about, can I just get the article in the inbox? There may not be anything to click on, but they want you to spend some time reading it.

[00:12:22] Matt: Um, whereas e-comm is Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. They want you to click on things and you know, like I just mentioned, right? There’s good indicators of what people. Like about your mail that build positive reputation, right? Things like did they reply to it? Did they read it? Did they save it? Did they star it?

[00:12:40] Matt: Did they favorite it? Did they put it in a folder? Anything that’s sort of a positive. I enjoyed this. I want to keep it for later. I. Type signal. Whereas then you have the negative signals of, I just deleted it without reading it. I didn’t even open it. Um, I reported to spam. I dragged it to my junk folder.

[00:12:59] Matt: Right? Those types of things where people are simply giving that signal of, I don’t care. I’m not doing anything with it. Um, absolutely it’s important and still to this day when I’m working with customers on deliverability challenges, we look at, let’s look at your segments. Let’s look at recency frequency of communication.

[00:13:18] Matt: Um, I. Let’s look at things like, are they purchasing offline? If you have brick and mortar stores, um, and how you tie that data back into your email program because, hmm, there is a connection to, I receive a message in my inbox, and then I think, oh, I was just in that store, or I’m going to that store later today, and it triggers your brain to go to the store.

[00:13:40] Matt: You may not have opened the inbox, but. You might say, oh, that, you know, the subject line could have been enough for someone to say, yeah, I want to go shop in store and you know, back in stock notification, I don’t need to know what it is ’cause I was asking for it. Right. Um, but if you could tie that I actually went in and purchased back to your email, then you can say [00:14:00] there’s an active user there.

[00:14:02] Matt: Um, so there are lots of different ways to look at segmentation, um, and a lot of different challenges when I, when I work with customers around. At what point do you say goodbye? Right. And it’s easy for us here in Canada, right? Yeah. The, our anti-spam law says if you have an implied consent, it’s only good for 24 months, period.

[00:14:19] Matt: If someone doesn’t do anything in 24 months, you have to chop ’em off at that point. Oh, right. Yeah. Um, and honestly, 24 months is a long time. So if, you know, think about an e-commerce company who’s sending eight emails a week. They send you eight emails a week for 104 weeks, and you don’t open or engage or any of those, right?

[00:14:40] Matt: They’ve sent you close to 800 messages or 800 and something messages, you’re probably not interested. You wanted the 10% discount, so you signed up and then you ignored them for two years. Is that an active, is that a valuable customer? Right. And that’s where I talk to my customer. Where is your valuable customer at?

[00:15:00] Matt: And how do you, how do you monitor that? How do you define that? And it’s different for every brand. So, but absolutely it makes sense. 

[00:15:08] Ken: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, and one of the, one of the ways that engagement is measured, uh, is on the opening of messages and, and historically, uh, senders would include a small, uh, web bug that would be opened by the users.

[00:15:25] Ken: Email client when they actually opened the message. But as we know now, uh, platforms like Gmail, uh, clients like Apple are, are now opening these images either ahead of time to do some security inspection on them, or, uh, they’re not opening them at all to protect the user or they’re opening them multiple times.

[00:15:45] Ken: Uh, you know, like we’ve done some analysis that shows that if you send a message to a Gmail recipient. You might get three open notifications for the same open event. Mm-hmm. Uh, and they’re all coming from different, uh, [00:16:00] infrastructure inside of Google that obviously are performing different purposes. So, uh, you know, has that signal of of the message open become completely irrelevant to senders.

[00:16:11] Matt: Irrelevant from A KPI performance. Yes. Completely irrelevant. No, I love it. Still as an indicator of where is the mail going? A lot of places don’t cache images for messages in the junk folder. So if you have a right open rate that’s pretty steady at 47% and then one day it’s 22%. Well, you probably landed in the, the Gmail junk folder, and Apple didn’t cash images that day.

[00:16:39] Ken: So it could be like a signal that a a, you’re watching that KPI for a change. Yes. Not so much as, not, not so much as a definite indicator that someone actually opened that thing, but it could maybe signal something else going on. 

[00:16:51] Matt: Especially with how Apple does it. Right. Once Apple cash is the image right.

[00:16:55] Matt: They never let you even, you could open the email 50 more times. You don’t get that signal anymore. You just get the one open. Right? Right. Whereas someone like Yahoo or Google, for example, you open it 50 times, you’re gonna get 51. Or in your case, like you’re saying 53, right? Yeah, yeah. Um, and then different platforms report on it, different, some ESPs, uh, block image caching as best they can to try to give you a more realistic image open rate.

[00:17:21] Matt: Hmm. Um, and others incorporate it all and just let you know, like there are non-human interactions within this. And that also counts for clicks. Right? There are so many companies now that click on email. Proofpoint, Mimecast, Barracuda. Right. They’re all clicking on links. ’cause they’re all trying to figure out is it going to a phishing website?

[00:17:42] Ken: Yeah. They might be like running that in a sandbox. Uh, you know, using a, a a, an AI to click around the destination and see what it means. 

[00:17:51] Matt: Yeah. So very, 

[00:17:51] Ken: yeah. Very interesting. Clicks are becoming 

[00:17:53] Matt: noisy as well. Right? Right, right. And that’s where, again, I look for trends like. People who look at a per campaign metric are almost looking at the wrong thing.

[00:18:04] Matt: You need to look at what has your campaign done this month, or your series of campaigns done this month, right? Um, in order to say, are things looking good? And again, you watch that deviation of steady line decline. There’s your problem, right? You back up a couple days and say, what happened? What did you do three days before the decline?

[00:18:25] Ken: This is the sort of thing you actually see as a deliverability consultant. 

[00:18:29] Matt: Yep, a hundred percent. We look at this stuff with our customers all the time to try to figure out, you know, is there a point in time where something changed? And if there is, typically you can tie it back to, um, you know, worst case scenario, we bought a list.

[00:18:47] Matt: Okay, well that’s gonna be a lot of problems, but other times it could be we went to an event, we were sponsored an event and got all the email addresses of everyone who attended the event. Okay, well you didn’t necessarily buy the list, but it’s not necessarily consent based either there’s a gray area maybe, or people aren’t expecting it, even though they may be checked the box.

[00:19:05] Matt: It says, give my email to the to the vendors. They may not expect you to subscribe them to your newsletter. They might say, reach out to me. Don’t subscribe me to your newsletter. So there’s an expectation missing. There are so many times I can count over the last 25 years where it can almost exactly pinpoint of, oh, you did that thing.

[00:19:26] Matt: That’s probably what caused the problem. Let’s undo that and see if it gets better. Like you said, sometimes people get compromised. That happens too. Again, fix the compromise, clean stuff up. You know, spend a little time in the dog house sleeping on the couch. Things tend to get better. 

[00:19:41] Ken: The email couch.

[00:19:42] Ken: Yeah, exactly. Um, so, uh, obviously a big topic these days is, uh, generative ai. I mean, the, the term generative AI is almost like passe is, you know, chat, GBT, clawed, anthropic, all, all of the, uh, technologies that are now wrapped around those things. Image generation, you know, uh. What is this doing to the email sending universe?

[00:20:09] Ken: What is, what are senders using gen AI for? What challenges is it, is it causing for your customers, uh, and what opportunities? 

[00:20:17] Matt: Yeah. I, I certainly from the sending side, there’s a number of things. Some of them are using it for image generation or image enhancement. Right? Uh, remove backgrounds, things like that.

[00:20:28] Matt: Make your images look a little nicer. Uh, certainly in the B2B side, senders are using it to generate. More unique content, internet writing by hand, a thousand messages a day. They’re using an AI to generate a thousand variations based on inputs from, you know, okay. I know Ken, he lives in the Vancouver area.

[00:20:49] Matt: He’s a CEO of a tech company. I can work that with an AI compared to like, okay. I also know Matt, he’s in the Toronto area. You know, he works in tech industry, but he is not a founder. So you can change the messaging. Right. Uh, for each person, if you have the right inputs, AI is doing that at scale. Now, on the, in the reverse side, mailbox providers are looking at those AI generated emails that are coming in and feeding those into their own AI to say, when you see these similarities, it’s potentially spam.

[00:21:21] Matt: So it’s speeding up content creation on one side and anti-spam filtering on the other. 

[00:21:27] Ken: It’s, it’s really just like a battle of the bots, right? It’s almost, that’s what it’s, it’s evolved into, it is 

[00:21:33] Matt: almost becoming that way. Now. The one piece is, you know, machine learning is really expensive. Right? Right.

[00:21:39] Matt: And the LMM is really expensive. Mm-hmm. Um, so it’s a balance of how do you keep your filters updated because the inbound side is always changing and the outbound side is changing. If you do outbound filtering, how do you keep up? Here are machine learning in an affordable way to stay on top of of that.

[00:22:01] Matt: Um, most recently, you know, apple, or sorry, not apple, Yahoo. Uh. A lot of people said, oh my God, apple changed things at the beginning of May. What happened? Well, apple just, or Yahoo just got a better, a better machine learning algorithm that identified more mail that their consumers have been complaining about.

[00:22:20] Matt: They didn’t really make right, massive changes. They just said, Hey, our, our little bot over here got smarter. Right? 

[00:22:27] Ken: Yeah. And that happens. But it, but of course there’s gotta be that moment at which somebody pushed the red button and deployed that thing, right? And, and the book before and after is felt by everyone.

[00:22:38] Ken: But it’s not like they made an advance announcement, Hey everybody, we’re gonna change our algorithm. That’s true. Yeah. Yeah. You know, those things that, yeah. 

[00:22:44] Matt: You know, but to be fair, spam filtering is adjusted probably every 10 15. Minutes, depending which platform you’re sending mail to. In some cases, like, you know, Google might be changing their algorithm every minute, right?

[00:22:58] Matt: I don’t know. Um, so it’s, it really is a matter of, maybe it wasn’t somebody, like you said, pushed the red button. It was more somebody said, I fed a new data set into the ai and it actually just got this much smarter in that 15 minute window. Things have calmed down a bit since then, but a lot of people. A lot of gray mailers saw impact as a result of it.

[00:23:22] Matt: Well, that’s good. That’s good. 

[00:23:24] Ken: Uh, you know, on the, on the anti-abuse side, um, I’ll, I’ll be honest, we’re, we’re not like using LLMs in production on our traffic. Uh, but we have been using them to help us in a lot of manual processes. Uh, you know. Our, our team spends a lot of their time just reviewing logs.

[00:23:45] Ken: Mm-hmm. You know, looking through, you know, looking to uncover patterns where there’s been some kind of coordinated activity and a thousand domains are related to each other because of what they’re doing, so that that entire category can be taken care of. Uh, and. One, one way that the AI models are being used is just to do, like generating regular expressions, uh, that then get fed into the policy system.

[00:24:09] Ken: Something as ancient as regular expressions still actually are quite powerful and useful. Yeah. Um. But the writing of the regular expression is really grunt work. Right? And, and so the LLM can help our team. They can feed in, you know, a bunch of subject lines, let’s say, and ask the AI to generate a regular expression that will match subject lines that have these patterns.

[00:24:31] Ken: And then it, I. Basically writes the code for you. Uh, that’s kind of a fake example, but just to give you a, a gist of how, how it’s being used. I, I can see how this stuff is eventually gonna be just processing everything. Yeah. You know, like, we’re not quite there yet. But, uh, even, even at our, uh, at the level of cost that we have to implement for the web hosting industry, which is cost competitive, uh, the cost of inference and the power of the models at small [00:25:00] scale is.

[00:25:00] Ken: Has become such that we are looking at it. Yeah. Uh, and, and I sort of wonder what that’ll do for, uh, you know, for the sending world when, uh, when senders who are perhaps having their traffic forwarded through web hosting accounts and out the other side are gonna start encountering more resistance for bad behavior on our platform.

[00:25:21] Ken: Uh. Something I look forward to, to be honest with, with some of the more gray area participants. Um, 

[00:25:27] Matt: and, and I, I think ideally, you know, if we want to look at, you know, everyone’s a good guy for catching the, the Compromise Sender instead. Right. Like that’s, that’s one you wanna look at. Um, I recently worked with an ESP that, uh, had an account takeover and they sent some Netflix and some PayPal and some social insurance stuff from the US government.

[00:25:48] Matt: And it’s one of those things where I was like, if you had just built a simple rule that said, you know, we know that PayPal’s not a customer. We know Netflix isn’t a customer. If someone tried to send mail as PayPal or as [00:26:00] Netflix, we would just stop it. And it was one of those like, well, that’s pretty simple thinking.

[00:26:05] Matt: And I’m like, yeah, but until they become your customer. It’s almost bulletproof. 

[00:26:11] Ken: Yeah, right. Yeah, it is pretty bulletproof. So, and it, yeah, you can take that notion and, and you can extend it with, with AI as well. You know, we, we as humans know, we know what a phishing attack looks like we Right. And if we, you know, if we show the AI look, this is what.

[00:26:28] Ken: Uh, this is what a phishing attack looks like from our perspective. Now go look at these logs and find more examples of that and it will go out and it’ll find you all kinds of stuff. Mm-hmm. Some of which is not really that, but some which is, and these tools are so powerful now, uh, you know, it used to be that you had to develop your own machine learning models from scratch to do that at scale, but now, uh, we’re finding you can just like chuck it at the LLM and what comes back is actually pretty actionable, uh, right out of the box.

[00:26:58] Ken: Yeah. Okay. So Mo, moving along. What kinds of tools can senders use these days? Uh. You know, so that they can be proactive and not get into trouble with the receivers. Uh, you work for Black Box, I, I understand Black Box has some stuff that could be helpful. 

[00:27:14] Matt: Yeah, so Black Box is one of our products. It’s mostly for ESPs or, or web hosting companies or, or, or filtering companies even.

[00:27:22] Matt: Um, anyone who’s sending mail in large volume. But typically it’s gonna work with somebody who has a list that they wanna upload into a platform and Black box looks and says, you know. Our analysis shows that these types of addresses cause issues when they’re sending. So as a platform, if you have a client that uploads a list with a large match rate of these are problematic type elements.

[00:27:51] Matt: Right? And we don’t just look at email. We’re looking at like where it’s hosted, we’re looking at networks. It’s potentially sending from like Black Box is, is it’s, it’s that it’s 3 billion. Data points it’s looking at to say, is this actually a good list that you want on your network to send mail from? So it’s not real time filtering, it’s looking at it.

[00:28:12] Matt: As there’s an action or an import to say, is this something I want on my network? Um, if it passes through, okay, it’s, it’s probably not a bad client. Uh, if it flags high enough, it might be suspicious enough that you say, talk to your customer support team to say, where did this actually come from? And if it flags really high, you might say, do we really want this person as a customer?

[00:28:33] Matt: Um, because there’s a lot of bad things, you know, we’re not the only ones that do this type of thing. Um, mm-hmm. And, uh, it works really well for the ESPs that we’ve talked to. We’ve had a lot of really long-term customers that have, uh, really sort of utilized the service, and you can tell when you look at their network and how frequently they get block listed or have delivery problems, things like that.

[00:28:55] Matt: I. They’re much fewer and farther between than platforms that just [00:29:00] don’t care. They’re just like, oh, upload whatever you want, send whatever you want. Right. Those platforms tend to have a lot more problems. So I mean, I like it as an anti-abuse thing, um, in regards to preventing abuse on my network. Mm-hmm.

[00:29:14] Matt: Right. 

[00:29:14] Ken: So there, there’s always new email services. Being developed. That’s one of the things that has always surprised me about the email industry. Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be another transactional mail provider, there’s like five more, right? And you look at them and you’re like, they’re actually really big, you know?

[00:29:33] Ken: And uh uh, so given that there’s new entrants all the time into this space. What would you recommend, uh, to somebody who is, let’s say, standing up yet another MailChimp clone with, you know, campaign management SMB focus, what, uh, sorts of advice would you give them to stay outta trouble and be successful?

[00:29:56] Ken: Uh, 

[00:29:57] Matt: I mean, be prepared for abuse day one. Right. Um, you know Jacob Alexa, the CEO of mail kit. He recently told the story at an event that I was at, that when they launched their very first customer that’s signed on the platform sent PayPal phishing. Very first customer. Very first one. First one, client ID one.

[00:30:20] Matt: Right. And he’s told me this story a couple times. Mm-hmm. And it was because they weren’t ready for it. So they basically said, no, we’re gonna put pause on the entire platform. They went away for a week. They thought about how they were gonna prevent abuse on the platform. They changed their entire thinking.

[00:30:36] Matt: Um, and I’ve heard that story like from other platforms time and time again to be like, we didn’t think we would be a target. We’re small, we’re brand new. It’s almost like they’re looking for small and brand new because you’re unprepared, right? So if you’re out there and you’re thinking of launching a platform.

[00:30:54] Matt: It doesn’t matter what it does, whether it’s a transactional platform, a campaigning platform, you’re targeting SMBs, you’re targeting enterprise. Be prepared for abuse on day one. Have a team, have a process. Have somebody who’s ready to help, um, and really sort of focus in on those types of things because they may not come today, but they’ll be there tomorrow.

[00:31:21] Matt: And the next day, and the next day and the next day. Mm-hmm. You know, look at services, you know, black Box is just one of the tools. Haw is another great tool. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, IP Quality Score is another great tool. So there’s lots of other tools out there that I. Take little bits of the abuse process when it comes to client onboarding or validation or sending or list quality and looks at those things and gives you a chance to say, is this the client I think it is, and is it the client I want?

[00:31:54] Matt: Right, 

[00:31:54] Ken: right. That’s really sage advice. Uh, so, um, what do you see [00:32:00] coming down the pipe in the deliverability space in the next while? Or, or maybe. What are you hopeful will happen? You know, like where, where do you see things going? Yeah, 

[00:32:08] Matt: I mean, I, I think, I feel like I’ve been, I got a couple items, a couple items here.

[00:32:12] Matt: I think, one, I’ve been beating the drum on amp for email for a long time. I think the fact that you get highly interactive emails in the user’s inbox, they could shop your site without leaving there reduces friction. You can do so many cool things with. Um, interactive email, whether it’s AMP or Kinetic email, which is mostly CSS driven.

[00:32:37] Matt: Um, you know, the support for it is relatively small still. Mostly Google, Yahoo and Mail RU supports AMP of Evolve, right? Um, but you know, the, the gains that I’ve seen with brands that have implemented amp. From a, uh, interactivity, from a closing a customer, from achieving the result, even if it’s, you know, like, uh, I’ve seen it from, from banks where it’s, you’ve applied for a loan book, an appointment to come talk to one of our representatives.

[00:33:09] Matt: You could do that from the email. Your calendar’s right there, so you can look at your calendar. You’re not back and forth between tabs. And you can say, this time, this day, click. And then you get the confirmation email or confirmation message right then and there saying your appointment’s confirmed with your representative.

[00:33:26] Matt: That’s amazing, right? Reduces friction, but you still achieve the net goal that you’re looking. I’ve seen it for product launch. I like scratch and win. I’ve seen it for carousel spin to win all of these things. Clients, end user clients love it because it’s something they’ve never seen before. Right? Um.

[00:33:48] Matt: Like 10 years ago, side scrolling emails versus vertically scrolling emails was a big thing, right? ’cause nobody did it. Um, from the email security side on the horizon, we have, you know, uh, DAC biz, which is the next evolution of DAC. Um, there’s some really great things coming out of that. So I think some clarifications on things that have sort of plagued DARC for a long time.

[00:34:13] Matt: Um, like percent tag. I’m glad that’s going away. A lot of mailbox providers ignore percent tag because it’s 10% of what? I don’t know what you’re sending me. Yeah. So I don’t know what 10% of it is, so they just kind of ignore. It’s 

[00:34:24] Ken: well intentioned. I can see where it came from. Absolutely. You know, it’s kind of like load balancing, you know?

[00:34:28] Ken: Yeah. I mean, we’ve done it for 

[00:34:29] Matt: 10 years and kind of figure it out. That doesn’t work. It’s time for it to, to move along. Uh, you know, D Chem two. Right. Mm-hmm. Coming out d Im two is another really interesting one that fixes or hopefully fixes some of the challenges we face with d Im where messages get forwarded and things get broken along the way, um, which cause then other different delivery challenges or different issues.

[00:34:52] Matt: Um, and I think, you know, we’re just gonna continue to see these incremental improvements to some of these existing technologies. Um. Ideally we’re gonna make them easier for people to implement. Right? Dmar is, or, uh, DNS is hard for a lot of people. Um, you know, I’ve seen clients with five D, or sorry, five D Mark records, which you can’t have.

[00:35:18] Matt: It’s one and done not right, and it’s because they work with. One provider that says Create this DAC record, they work with another provider says, create this D They’re just dutifully 

[00:35:27] Ken: following the instructions. Instructions. 

[00:35:28] Matt: And they’re following the instructions and they end up with multiple records, which basically says, I have none.

[00:35:34] Matt: So, um, DNS is hard. It’s confusing. Yeah. Um, based on some of the ESP tech stacks even, um. If you’re using like a Klaviyo, well it might be SendGrid underneath. So then all of a sudden now you have two networks you’re sending mail through. Um, or in some cases they might also use spark posts for some of their mail uhhuh.

[00:35:58] Matt: So you could be potentially sending mail through three networks. Um, it gets confusing. It’s a lot of extra DNS to get done and set up. So, um, there are certainly, you know, some challenges there. I think we’ll also continue to see some consolidation. Tools will get purchased, tools get merged together. Most recently if you think like Litmus being purchased by validity.

[00:36:19] Matt: Right, right. Um, I think we’ll continue to see that ESPs acquiring other ESPs, uh, like for a while Marigold. Right. They acquired what, seven ESPs now at this point. Right, right. Um, so there’s, there’s going to continue to be some consolidation and I think, um, that will, will carry on even on, on the receiving side.

[00:36:42] Matt: Like Proofpoint just bought, um, was it Barracuda? They just bought, 

[00:36:49] Ken: I, you know what? I’ve been sleeping on that topic. I mean, but yeah, they like, 

[00:36:52] Matt: they just bought another platform, so now they own Wow. You know, a third sort of inbound platform and they are by far the biggest Oh, Hornet Blue. Yeah, that’s right.

[00:37:01] Matt: Hornet. Sorry. Yeah. 

[00:37:02] Ken: So Hornet security, 

[00:37:03] Matt: which was made secure. Yeah, that’s right. Right. So you watch the One Fish buy the next Fish, right, right, right. So, um. That will continue to happen in the space and, you know, does it make it easier? Yes and no. Right? Google has such a big market share of email. When they make a change, it impacts everybody.

[00:37:25] Matt: You know, if, uh, you know, SA tell makes a change. 99% of the world doesn’t even know who SaskTel is, let alone that’s, 

[00:37:36] Ken: that’s unfair to people who live in Saskatchewan. I mean, 

[00:37:38] Matt: but I’m using that as an example. But like, you know, it’s one of those things where the footprint matters more. So as you see these acquisitions happen.

[00:37:51] Matt: Um, you know, even the idea of like, if, if someone was offended enough on an on the block list side and said, well, [00:38:00] that ESP has just sent me far too much spam, I’m gonna block everything they send. Imagine Spam House said I’m gonna block everything. That ex ExactTarget Sense. I. Okay. Well, 40% of the internet just stops accepting all of the email from ExactTarget.

[00:38:12] Matt: Yeah. Or Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Right. 

[00:38:13] Ken: I mean that hypothetically, that kind of thing is We’ve come close to this in the past. I, I, yeah. Yeah. 

[00:38:19] Matt: I mean, it, it has, but that we shouldn’t have to get that close. Like we shouldn’t have to be like Doomsday clock one second to midnight. Yeah. For an email provider, there should be enough responsibility on both sides to fix the problems that are causing this issue.

[00:38:34] Matt: Um. Uh, but again, I think, you know, there’s profit margins and shareholder value and things like that that Yeah. Are, are functioning on both sides and unhappy customers on either side of the equation. Cause friction. 

[00:38:50] Ken: Absolutely. Yeah. Money talks, right? I. Well look, um, we’re outta time, Matt, but it’s been wonderful, um, having you on the podcast.

[00:38:58] Ken: And I, I think we probably have to do a second episode at some point to get an update on how things have changed yet again in, in the email industry. Uh, and, uh, I wish you all the best. Thanks. Thanks for joining. Thanks 

[00:39:10] Matt: very much for inviting me. Great chatting with you again.