Deliverability History: Habeas, Deliverability Settings and Email Testers
Back in the day, when Mickey Chandler and I were both working in deliverability and compliance for ExactTarget (later Salesforce Marketing Cloud), I put together an email testing tool called the Reputation Audit.
The genesis of this tool – why I created it – was to rebut Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) that a particular email deliverability vendor (Habeas) was spreading. Armed with some sort of Habeas-built email scanning report, their salespeople would reach out to ExactTarget customers and try to stoke the fears of deliverability failure. “Did you know that you failed test number six on this report?” and similar leading questions were offered. Let us meet, they offered, and we’ll tell you everything you’re doing wrong from a deliverability technological configuration standpoint and why you should pay us to help you address any deliverability problems you were having.
The problem is that the reporting was often inaccurate. Multiple clients came to support, escalating up to our deliverability team, accusing us of having misconfigured client setups to impede a client’s chances of successfully getting delivered to the inbox. But that wasn’t true. I’m kind of a nerd about these sorts of things, and ExactTarget was filled with people who were nerds about these sorts of things. Technical glitches can happen, undoubtedly, but they were generally not happening here.
At first, I spent many hours manually pulling information from Gmail headers to demonstrate that everything was configured correctly. Emails were authenticated with DKIM and DMARC. That their custom return-path domain was properly configured. Linking to Return Path’s Sender Score, showing blocklisting status, etc.
And then I thought to myself, can I automate this? After all, Habeas built a tool to pull together a report showing off different data points about an email sender or message. Why can’t I do the same? So, I built a tool called Reputation Audit.
The way that the Reputation Audit tool worked was pretty simple. You sent an email message to a unique email address. A script downloaded that email message, pulled it apart, and built a report based on what was found. IPs and domains were checked against blocklists. A SpamAssassin score was provided. Forward and Reverse DNS checks were performed. Email authentication was checked, and as common authentication requirements evolved, TLS and DMARC checks were added.
Users could get their own Reputation Audit account and get direct access to the resulting reports as they came through. No need to ask support for assistance. And if you were an agency client or reseller, you could help multiple clients from your one account.
Reputation Audit was very popular, and it gave me an easy way to push back on what Habeas was doing. If a Habeas salesperson solicited one of our clients with false or incomplete information, I’d run a Reputation Audit and show them all of the different data points that we have personally checked using this tool, and demonstrate that everything was indeed configured correctly.
Eventually, Habeas faded out of existence. But the Reputation Audit tool lived on, and continued to be quite popular. At its peak, there were somewhere around six hundred active accounts, and support regularly and actively helped to execute Reputation Audit tests for many hundreds of clients.
Since then, Mickey and I have both moved on from Salesforce. My understanding is that the Reputation Audit system has either been deprecated or shut down, and that it’s not available to customers any more.
Which is a shame; because with a bit of polishing, it would be perfectly positioned to help email marketers confirm compliance with the new Yahoo and Google sender requirements. That’s exactly the kind of tester needed; something that can receive a message, pull apart the headers, and generate a detailed report to confirm whether or not you’re in full compliance with modern deliverability best practices and mailbox provider requirements.
And that’s where Steve Atkins comes into the story. He and his wife Laura Atkins run an email consultancy service called Word to the Wise, and they’ve been working in this wild and wooly world of email, compliance and deliverability just as long as Mickey and I have. Their slogan is “We make email better,” and Steve has built a very useful email tester tool that 100% embodies this slogan.
That tool is called “Aboutmy.email” and when you visit the front page, don’t let yourself be underwhelmed by what you see. It’s very simply displayed, especially at the front door. There’s an email address. A unique address, just for you. Grab that address, paste it into your ESP or CRM email platform, and send your campaign email to that address. Switch back to your browser tab pointing at the Aboutmy tool, and watch a report be generated right before your eyes. A very detailed report that covers everything a modern email marketer needs to check to ensure that all of their technical settings are correct. It’ll help you understand if you’re in compliance with the Yahoo and Google requirements. It’ll help you find problems with your DNS or server settings, one-click unsubscribe settings, BIMI config, image load issues, and a whole lot more.
I can’t believe this tool is free. It’s so well done, and just what people need to confirm compliance with modern sender requirements. To me, it is very much the spiritual successor to the Reputation Audit tool, and if you were a Reputation Audit user, and you were wondering what you should use now, today, instead? The answer is clear: Aboutmy.Email.
