Email peeps out there: email weaknesses are not always just technical!

Not only since the initial announcement by Google and Yahoo in October 2023, there has been a lot of discussion and even panic in the commercial email marketing world about authentication, protocols and techniques.

Deliverability experts and consultants are springing up like mushrooms, trying to solve the problem for brands and companies alike.

What strikes me is that, once again, the solution is discussed only in terms of implementation and compliance with technical requirements, and the historical, long-standing causes are often not recognised and addressed.

So I'm going to try to step back from the familiar technical requirements and point out some other things that I think may be at the root of the problems we're seeing today.

1. Email became too cheap and lost its sustainability
2. Growth at the cost of quality
3. Domain inflation in online marketing
4. Email marketers lack technical skills
5. Liberal tolerance of commercial bulk mailers
6. Email has created its own set of silos

Email became too cheap to sell and lost sustainability

Email is a highly successful commercial sales channel. The return on investment has been the best and most reliable in online marketing over the last two decades. This success story has led to everyone sending email about everything to everyone. This demand has created a fiercely competitive environment among vendors and service providers, with prices for bulk commercial email falling, resulting in a more or less strong focus on sales email campaigns and a declining interest in using email as a customer retention or communication tool.

This has become our biggest problem today, we call it persuasive spam, which is the most annoying for the users who receive it. The sheer volume of promotional emails floods inboxes and seems to add no real value when most of the emails received are just discounts, bundles and other sales triggers.

Due to the pressure to succeed in marketing and the tricks used, recipients lose awareness of the difference between legitimate and criminal email strategies.

This is a gateway that email fraudsters like to use to develop their spam campaigns, as they already know the technical standards and requirements best.

Growth at the cost of quality

With success came many new email service providers. Growth and profits were low-hanging fruit, and after the early 2000s we saw new email providers start to offer and make money from different delivery and service models. Many of them had one thing in common - email standards became secondary to growth and success.

ESPs failed to push their customers and enforce standards because, unfortunately, this was no longer as necessary due to the isolated solutions offered by the large mailbox providers.

Many of the issues and discussions we have today around email standards and best practice are the result of an extremely liberal view of standards, driven solely by business interests and growth.

Domain inflation in online marketing

Some of you may have heard of lookalike domains.

Domains are the key element for anyone who has a public presence on the Internet. The domain is your business card and, if maintained carefully, can be your unique identifier. But here it comes: "carefully and properly maintained".

What does this mean? It means that you need to think carefully about the intended use of a domain and the impact that the creation and use of new domains could have on your brand.

Domains are easy to set up, don't cost much and can be managed by almost anyone with a little technical understanding and the right tools. Many agencies do this for their clients.

Let me give you an example: you are an insurance company with the domain insurance.org and you have been sending emails to your customers for a long time. You are known, trusted and somehow expected in the inbox. One day a marketing campaign is launched and someone has the bright idea to create a new domain insurance-campaign.org to run this campaign, assuming that it is uniquely branded and therefore known, trusted and expected.

The scammers are grateful for this access to your trusted environment. They are happy to use it to place their real spam campaigns.

Email marketers lack technical skills

Because email marketing is part of online marketing and the Internet, it requires basic technical knowledge. No one expects an email marketer to know the explicit details of SMTP, SPF, DKIM or DMARC, but if you want to be a safe driver, you should at least know the basics of how your car works, how it operates and that brakes are just as important as lights.

The same applies to email marketing. If you want to ensure that your email marketing is set up correctly and meets the latest technical standards, every email marketer needs to acquire some basic knowledge to at least follow the wider discussion and understand the constant changes in the market.

In many cases, panic and confusion on the part of brands is due to a lack of basic knowledge about how deliverability and basic standards work. In particular, ESPs with very liberal client and onboarding management have problems with communication and implementation, as technical knowledge cannot be communicated and trained in the required way. Brands, on the other hand, do not see the need to acquire knowledge as they commission an ESP and everything works somehow.

Again, the spammers have a deep technical understanding of both the commercial and technical side and use this grey area of lack of knowledge to their advantage.

Liberal tolerance of commercial bulk mailers

We all know that global brands are valuable, powerful, market leaders, recognised, respected and trusted. So far, so good, they deserve it and are part of the ecosystem.

But does that mean that famous and important brands need to get special treatment, that it's OK for them not to follow the standard and get their mass promotional emails in the inbox just because the CEO of the brand knows the CEO of MBP well? Is that setting an example? I have seen so many exceptions over the years simply because of the weight of the brand's reputation. MBP is still creating exceptions and rewarding the lazy behaviour of companies that don't care and don't follow best practice.

As long as there are these exceptions, we have the argument: why does it work for them and not for us? Standards are there to make a difference, to separate the good from the bad, and anyone who wants to be a successful part of the email ecosystem needs to help maintain it for the sake of long-term business profitability and security.

Leading by example is a principle that should apply to all leading organisations, and all should be equally punished for breaching standards. It would be true liberalism if all were treated equally, regardless of their historical status, size or importance.

Email has created its own set of silos

Email was supposed to be a global and equally used and managed communication channel. But the evolution of the last 3 decades has created its own pitfalls. Although email is already an outsider in its own silo in the online world, we have managed to add our own set of strict and useless silos.

• The marketing itself, the source of evil for some Mailbox Providers.
• The Mailbox Providers, who only want to give email marketing a hard time.
• The email marketeers who have no clue and interest in email tech and keep spamming.
• The email tech nerds who live in their tech bubble far away from reality.
• We have got the stupid end user, who wants discounts, nothing else.
• We have the Europeans, who stick to GDPR to harm email business.
• We have the Americans, who do not care about legislation and do everything for profit.
• We have the fundamentalists, who do not see the difference between 1971 and 2024.

I bet everyone came across at least one of these stereotypes mentioned in that list and as long as we will not return to a joint approach and break these silos, we will remain having a hard time.

But good news for spammers: Finally, you learned to use unfilled gabs while the silos and stereotypes keep discussing and shouting at each other.

Finally

Email still has a solid foundation, a strong community and the greatest value of any digital communication channel: it's free!

In the incredible success story of email over the last 3 decades, we have put email itself at risk! We created some of the security problems we are now struggling to solve.

We don't need to reinvent the wheel. Everything we need is there.

Some parties should try something new instead of sticking to the old way just because we've been doing it for 30 years.

For some parties, it's worth looking back and returning to a more consistent and rigorous facilitation of old-school approaches and standards, rather than doing special favours for everyone.

Last but not least, we need to improve the exchange of information and communication with each other. Recent developments in the market give me hope that we are on the right track. It's like going to the gym, you don't see the results until it hurts a bit. And working out in a team is more fun than working out alone anyway. So brands, email service providers and mailbox providers, the start has been made, now it's time to pull together in the right direction.