Postini is dead but it doesn't matter

The global email community rejoiced this week with Google's news that they are shutting down the Postini service and migrating some of its functionality to Google Apps. Officially, Postini is an email and web security and archiving platform which was purchased by Google in 2007, but most of us know it for spam filtering.

I have dealt with Postini as a user, a sender and as a consultant working with clients trying to get their emails into the inbox. As a user I liked it (sort of), I found the quarantine functionality forced me to review what would have gone into the Junk folder on a regular basis. It would have been better if it had actually learned from the actions I took on quarantined messages a bit quicker (in fairness I have not been on the user side in over three years and I suspect Google was able to accomplish this after buying them).

As a sender and consultant however, I found Postini to be very frustrating for the same reason. It didn't seem to learn and as a consequence routinely filtered out emails that the recipient expected and wanted. In the email industry we call these false positives, and Postini did not limit these false positives to commercial email but would also routinely catch person to person emails in their net. Jordan Cohen VP of marketing for Movable Ink described Postini as "a false positive machine".

So what does this mean for me?
I wonder however, what this will mean for my B2B clients who were the ones who most routinely ran into Postini issues. Unfortunately, I do not expect a huge jump in inbox placement and a knock-on effect to the process metrics as Postini boxes around the globe are decommissioned.

Most clients only became aware of Postini issues when their test messages were getting quarantined by their own Postini box. This tended to cause much gnashing of teeth, consternation and sometimes panic but at the end of the day it was what it was if the client was already following best practices. This change may however, provide marketers with more visibility into the problem.

Ideally, the default setting of the filtering systems built into Google Apps will closely mirror the filtering rules that Google follows on the consumer version of Gmail. Sysadmins will still be able to tweak and fiddle with the spam filtering settings in Google Apps; it will be interesting to see how many actually do.

If many defer to the Google experts then marketers can more easily monitor what is happening with the Google eco-system on the B2B side by testing on the B2C side. If it plays out this way, the additional visibility will be great but that just indicates that there is a problem but doesn’t provide a solution. The solution of course is to maintain a good sender reputation by following deliverability best practices.

10 tips on achieving a good sender reputation
The DMA Email Marketing Council's Email Deliverability Review lists the following 10 deliverability best practices:

1. Improve your data collection by strengthening the permission mechanism, double entry of email addresses and sending a validation email.
2. Implement authentication (your email service provider should do this for you).
3. Monitor your reputation using readily available tools like senderscore.org. Like a credit score, a damaged reputation can take a long time to repair after it has gone south.
4. Manage your IP address carefully by making sure if you have sufficient volumes to keep it warm it is dedicated to your use.
5. Practice good list hygiene by properly handling hard and soft bounces as well as routinely scrubbing addresses that are no longer engaged.
6. Use complaint feedback loops and process unsubscribe complaints promptly.
7. Monitor blacklists and work with the list owners to get yourself removed if you get listed.
8. Reduce spam complaints by tactics such as putting the unsubscribe link at the top, allowing people to change the frequency with which they receive your emails and letting recipients take a mailing holiday if their situation temporarily changes.
9. Test your email before sending not only as a quality assurance step but also to highlight any deliverability issues
10. Get accredited but you will have to be doing steps one through nine before you can even consider this.

The demise of Postini has probably been on the cards since the day that the purchase was announced by Google. It will hopefully help marketers by removing what is essentially a black box into which they had no visibility and allow them to identify deliverability problems within the Google ecosphere. In the end however, email marketers will still need to follow deliverability best practice to get their emails into the inbox.

Skip Fidura, managing director, dotAgency and DMA Email Marketing Council vice-chair
@skipfidura

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