Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

obem.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 110 posts

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#11

Post by kehers »

thih9 wrote: post #10

Nitpicking: in the final chart with merged providers, the 'mandrillapp.com' section and 'mailchimp' section are still shown as separate. Is this intentional? I assumed the opposite, given that: > Mandrillapp.com is the transactional email service for Mailchimp. It used to be a standalone service until it became deeply integrated into Mailchimp.

Yes it's intentionally as Mandrill is still used solely for transactional emails and Mailchimp for marketing. Same reason I didn't merge Mailgun and Mailjet.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#12

Post by basch »

bognition wrote: post #6

Very interesting thanks for sharing. initially I was surprised that HubSpot didn’t make the list, until I realized that there is a nice intersection here with what you observed and the target businesses of the Email services. For example MailChimp Targets small B2C companies while Hubspot targets small B2B business. I’m guessing the op isn’t a small B2B business hence the lack of hubspot in the list.

Same with Pardot missing.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#13

Post by thedance »

npsomaratna wrote: post #8
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone currently dealing with this on multiple fronts: it's complicated. ESP's block out different ranges for different customers, dedicated vs shared IPs, etc. really hard to generalize.

Shameless plug: we had the same issue with our deliverability rates. We ended up creating a tool to automate the process of checking spam % vs. inbox % for various email subject/body combinations: https://vetter.monsoonyeti.com/

Interesting, but it’s hard to see the big utility. Most spam signals are based on behavior and reputation rather that content. Your email can look clean at first, but if a handful of gmail accounts mark it as spam then your whole network will be on the bozo list within seconds. Gmail in particular is capable of reclassifying messages, if it gets delivered but then your reputation falls, it will get moved to spam if the user hasn’t seen it yet, so initial deliverability is not final.

Maybe the other big operators are more content-based?

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#14

Post by thih9 »

kehers wrote: post #11
thih9 wrote: post #10

Nitpicking: in the final chart with merged providers, the 'mandrillapp.com' section and 'mailchimp' section are still shown as separate. Is this intentional? I assumed the opposite, given that: > Mandrillapp.com is the transactional email service for Mailchimp. It used to be a standalone service until it became deeply integrated into Mailchimp.

Yes it's intentionally as Mandrill is still used solely for transactional emails and Mailchimp for marketing. Same reason I didn't merge Mailgun and Mailjet.

Thanks for the explanation and for the article. That was a fun read!

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#15

Post by kehers »

bognition wrote: post #6

Very interesting thanks for sharing. initially I was surprised that HubSpot didn’t make the list, until I realized that there is a nice intersection here with what you observed and the target businesses of the Email services. For example MailChimp Targets small B2C companies while Hubspot targets small B2B business. I’m guessing the op isn’t a small B2B business hence the lack of hubspot in the list.

Yes, for the mailbox I ran it on. I'll like to see someone do this on a "business" mailbox

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#16

Post by runlevel1 »

TacticalTable wrote: post #7

It's interesting that this is missing a lot of major enterprise marketing email providers. The author clearly isn't subscribing to things like Best Buy's weekly deal email, or Target cart reminders.

A few years back, one of our (Twilio SendGrid's) developer evangelists created an open source Chrome extension to show the icon of the ESP who sent a message in Gmail.

The last big Gmail UI update broke it, but most of the ESP identification strategies probably still work: https://github.com/nquinlan/Email-Intelligence/blob/master/c...

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#17

Post by kehers »

runlevel1 wrote: post #16
TacticalTable wrote: post #7

It's interesting that this is missing a lot of major enterprise marketing email providers. The author clearly isn't subscribing to things like Best Buy's weekly deal email, or Target cart reminders.

A few years back, one of our (Twilio SendGrid's) developer evangelists created an open source Chrome extension to show the icon of the ESP who sent a message in Gmail. The last big Gmail UI update broke it, but most of the ESP identification strategies probably still work: https://github.com/nquinlan/Email-Intelligence/blob/master/c...

This is nice. Shows a different approach to getting the ESP from the mail header.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#18

Post by oefrha »

amirathi wrote: post #4

Deliverability is a big marketing/selling point for all these providers & important selection criteria for their customers. So it'd be very interesting to see what % of emails for each provider landed in Inbox vs Promotions/Spam/Junk folder.

> So it'd be very interesting to see what % of emails for each provider landed in Inbox vs Promotions/Spam/Junk folder.

Are those percentages really a good measure of deliverability? I mean, a significant portion of “one million dollars for you” scams in my Gmail spam folder are from @gmail.com addresses; that doesn’t say anything about gmail.com to gmail.com deliverability.

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#19

Post by npsomaratna »

thedance wrote: post #13
npsomaratna wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shameless plug: we had the same issue with our deliverability rates. We ended up creating a tool to automate the process of checking spam % vs. inbox % for various email subject/body combinations: https://vetter.monsoonyeti.com/

Interesting, but it’s hard to see the big utility. Most spam signals are based on behavior and reputation rather that content. Your email can look clean at first, but if a handful of gmail accounts mark it as spam then your whole network will be on the bozo list within seconds. Gmail in particular is capable of reclassifying messages, if it gets delivered but then your reputation falls, it will get moved to spam if t…

From repeated testing using multiple sender accounts and domains, we've noticed that Outlook seems to pay significant weight to the content of the email - possibly as much as or even more than the email/domain of the sender.

What you say certainly rings true about Gmail - email subjects/bodies that set off warning bells in Outlook seemingly pass through Gmail without a hitch if your account has a good sender reputation - and vice-versa. However, we've also noticed that even if you have a good sender reputation, Gmail can and will (automatically) spam your content if the wording is too spammy/phishy.

Yahoo seems to be midway between Outlook and Gmail, at least from what I've observed.

Anyway, do give the tool a spin and try out various types of emails. I'm sure you'll find the results interesting!

[EDIT] Oh, BTW - you can set the tool to use your own service as well! Obviously, this will be more accurate than using the default (which is an SES account we use).

Re: Mining my mailbox for top email service providers

#20

Post by ragebol »

TacticalTable wrote: post #7

It's interesting that this is missing a lot of major enterprise marketing email providers. The author clearly isn't subscribing to things like Best Buy's weekly deal email, or Target cart reminders.

> The author clearly isn't subscribing to things like Best Buy's weekly deal email, or Target cart reminders.

I don't think that will be interesting for the author given where he's based. (I first assumed Belgium due to the domain's TLD, but it's actually Nigeria)

Post reply on HN