Hello Jérôme, already three years since the first interviewWhat has happened to you professionally since 2010?
Hello Jonathan. After 11 years with one of France's leading routers, I've decided to set up my own business as a Independent consultant specializing in deliverability.
I started from the fact that many companies were sending their emails by their own means and that this was not always done in the rules of art.
This motivated me to set up a consulting and services offer around deliverability ranging fromdeliverability auditthe compliance of routing practices as well as a outsourced and independent management service for monitoring deliverability.
I am also a reseller of the professional SMTP solution PowerMTA from Port25 and I offer a complete service of installation, configuration, integration and optimization of this SMTP gateway, which is in my opinion the best on the market today.
My website was released last week and it presents my offer in detail.
Also, I wanted to get more involved in the regulation of the French emailing ecosystem and I am a technical advisor for Signal Spam.
My company is called DeliverNow and it's now almost 3 years old, I'm thrilled with it.
During the last three years, how has deliverability evolved? What's new?
Deliverability is a complex art, and it hasn't changed!
The factors that condition deliverability can be technical and marketing. But often, it is a question of definition and organization of the deliverability function within the company.
Often, the lack of knowledge of this specialty and the factors that condition it make it difficult for advertisers to understand.
In France, the major evolution of the last few years has been the tightening of the rules at ISPs, especially at Orange, which has equipped itself with Vade Retro for the protection of email boxes, and Cloud Mark's antispam technology for the protection of its gateway. This evolution has allowed Orange to be extremely efficient in the detection and regulation of incoming threats on its platform, for the greatest happiness of its users.
At the international level, the ongoing transition to IPv6 is forcing ISPs to base their reputation calculations less and less on the sending IP and more and more on the domains present in the email and on the target links of the message. The detection of the advertisers who benefit from the email campaign is more and more efficient. GMAIL is for me the most advanced webmail on this point.
You are a technical advisor for Signal Spam. Can you present us in a few words the role of the association?
Three years ago, when I started as a freelancer, I wanted to get involved in the fight against spam and do something for the ecosystem. At that time, Signal Spam was in a rebuilding process and it was the association that seemed to me to need the most resources. I started to provide my services as a volunteer and then, when the need became more important, as a technical advisor.
Signal Spam is a public/private association that gathers the main actors of the mail ecosystem, the anti-spam fight and the authorities.
It includes the 2 main French ISPs Orange and SFR, the biggest routers, IT security companies and regulatory authorities such as the police and the CNIL.
Need help?
Reading content isn't everything. The best way is to talk to us.
Signal Spam's role is to collect spam (or perceived spam) reports from Internet users, to extract useful information for the fight against spam and to redistribute them to the ecosystem in the form of data flows. Among these data, Signal Spam proposes a feedback loop to email senders whose goal is marketing regulation and the exercise of the right to object. Signal Spam members with an email sender profile commit themselves to apply these 2 purposes thanks to the data they receive via the FBL.
Finally, Signal Spam is a place for exchange and cooperation of the members of the French ecosystem.
How do you see ReturnPath's role in the emailing world? Aren't they becoming the "Post Office" of email, a sort of obligatory passage?
ReturnPath markets two products: a tool to improve deliverability and IP address certification.
Regarding the tool to improve deliverability, it contains a rendering and antispam test, a mailbox monitoring test and a reputation monitoring tool. It is a good tool that can complement the sender's own internal tools. But I don't think it should be used as the only indicator to measure deliverability because the coverage of domains is not exhaustive and more and more ISPs integrate the behavior of Internet users in the filtering of incoming emails.
Regarding certification, the eligibility criteria are high and have been tightened, including the thresholds of Hotmail SRD and I have more and more feedback from emails from certified IPs distributed in spam folder on Hotmail and Yahoo. On the other hand, I think it is a good service that should be seen not as deliverability insurance or a pass, but rather as a buffer that will allow, in the long term, to absorb variations and ultimately minimize the impact on the average deliverability over a long period.
For me, there is no miracle recipe, only the respect of good marketing practices and the sharp analysis of SMTP transaction data allows to obtain and maintain a good deliverability.
In France, all the major ISPs use Vade Retro's services to manage their anti-spam filters, is it an advantage or a disadvantage?
Indeed, Vade Retro protects mailboxes and this technology is based more on the message's fingerprint than on the user's behavior (which will give the reputation). But Vade Retro is not installed everywhere with the same configuration, the ISP user of the tool has the possibility to customize the settings and the hardness of the antispam filter.
From a deliverability point of view, the quasi-monopoly of Vade Retro on the French antispam can be seen as an advantage and a disadvantage: in case of a false positive problem, the impact is great because the share of addresses protected by Vade Retro is large in an average French database. But also, in case of a correction from Vade Retro, the problem is solved for all ISPs at once.
Vade Retro is a serious company to talk to and is very committed to filtering spam properly, false positive issues are taken seriously and Vade Retro cooperates with the ecosystem.
What are the major evolutions that we will see in the coming months or years regarding deliverability?
Technically: the continuation of the switch to IPv6 for email servers and the complete migration to a sender reputation based on the domains present in the email.
Also, I am in favor of a distinction between "private correspondence" and "newsletters/advertisements" boxes, but I don't want to make any predictions about the generalization of this feature in email clients.
In the first interview, you told us that "Batch, Spray and Pray" was no longer relevant, is this still true three years later? Have marketers really understood the importance of good deliverability management for the results of their campaigns?
It depends, the email acquisition market is still very opportunistic and as I often mention on my blog, it is not, or very little, regulated.
We can see attempts at self-regulation here and there, new associations, emailing charters, but in fact, I note that the market is still very "border".
We have seen a number of important players enter the market and announce that they are in possession of impressive volumes of email addresses, obviously all acquired in a loyal way, and make a lot of money thanks to the affiliate programs that put them in touch with advertisers.
As long as the market allows it, there will always be companies that will position themselves at the limits of acceptability. Too many advertisers are being fooled by overly attractive offers and the price war is dragging down quality. However, I notice that serious advertisers are less and less fooled and have understood that their reputation and their turnover also depend on the quality of their online communications.
