Nicolas Toper: The Last Open Social Network

Our interview of Nicolas Toper for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere. Nicolas is the co-founder of a company called Inbox Booster, which helps businesses test and optimize their email campaigns to improve deliverability and lower the chances that they are flagged as spam.

This interview is a little off the beaten path for us, since we are talking about email marketing, rather than social media. But as Nicolas points out: email is the “last open social network” because it is not controlled by any single company and can be used by everyone.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I am joined today by Nicholis Toper. Welcome to the podcast.

Nicolas Toper:
Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You are a little bit off the beaten path for my guess because you are not a YouTube expert but an email expert.

Nicolas Toper:
Yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:
What set you down that path?

Nicolas Toper:
That's a good question. Actually what happened is I got in, it was initially just a day job. I was really like a random tear consequences, serendipity. I started working after high school and then I went, so I'm from France and in France you can go to night classes and you can get all the way to a master, which is what I did. And the job I found, they wanted me to do some email marketing stuff and they had a problem with AOL at that time, which tells you how old I am. And actually it turns out that the professor at my school, one of the ones giving us a class teaching was actually the guy who invented the spam filter from AOL and it's happened in front. So he did that worldwide. So he explained to me how that's working. Like, oh yeah, that's how it's working. That's kind of what you need to be careful of. And so I brought that to my company. I guess, they were like, oh wow, you're so smart, you figure it out. I'm super smart.

And so that's kind how I got started. And then I found, this is very interesting. When you start getting something at the first point, you start to get usually interested into it. And the reason I got interested is because email is the last open social network. If you want to email the President of the USA you can. If you want to, well if you actually send him an Instagram [message] email, reading them, it's not going to work or it might be filtered out. So there are a lot of, it's not totally open in the sense that you can talk to anyone and it's free to send an email to anyone. It's not owned by a corporation or anyone. It's like a free common. And that's kind of the only thing, the only left network because Meta or Facebook, WhatsApp, all of them or even Signal, all of them are owned by a corporation or nonprofit and they decide what to do with email. Actually the people who are using it who get to decide and that's the only one like that. That's why also has a lot of problems. But that's I think something a little bit beautiful about it.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So just to get in the weeds a little bit, if you send an email from Gmail, is that different from sending an email from Outlook or sending an email from Apple Mail and how potentially the recipient's software might view it?

Nicolas Toper:
So the real answer is yes, but I'll keep it to the easy answer, which is it doesn't matter. That's kind of the point is it's all the same. But what matters is because anyone can send emails, then you had to put barriers in place. So you had to create spam filters to avoid that because in email you can have very, very important communication and you have a lot of fraud in it. So you can have lots of people going to impersonate other people because that's easy to do. And two, you can have also information that you don't want. It's kind of the same as being in the city. Like say you're in New York City or in Paris where I'm from, you have lots of people trying to interact with you all the time. And what you do as someone from this type of cities, you learn to ignore everything that has nothing to do with you directly.

It's almost a survival mechanism. And if you don't do that, you get in trouble. So that's one thing I noticed from people from the West coast. If they don't have this type of mechanism when they move to Europe or to the East Coast, it's a little bit the same thing. You need to-email is an important media and you need this type of mechanism.

So what can happen to go back to your initial question is you might end up in spa without knowing because your email might be cut as is. Sometimes you say to someone in the screen, Hey, hey, how are you doing? I haven't seen you for a long time. That person doesn't recognize you because you've seen each other like 10 years ago and this person is busy or so and they're going to move off. That's a little bit what can happen with an email and that can happen.

So one thing important, that type of thing can happen at two levels. It can happen of when you are sending an email to a friend, a customer, a client, or whomever and from newsletter and they operate under two different rules. If you're sending an email from Gmail and it's only one email, this my feature is smart enough to know that you've sent it just to you just to one, just to someone. But if you're going to send a thousand emails or 10,000 or a million, the rules are going to be a little bit different because they understand that.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So to get into the weeds a second, and we talked before we started the interview about, I didn't even know this existed until about a year ago. It came up in a case about the long header on an email. What is a long header?

Nicolas Toper:
So the thing is when you look at an email, you have, this mail has been sent from, there is a subject, there are a couple, this is called headers. So it's information about the email, but the body, so about the content of the email has been sent around and those things, anybody can edit them. So if I want to send an email saying I'm you, then I can do it. Now what will happen is that's why we introduced some security measure in email to prevent that from happening. But then you need to check them and if you don't know what to check then you'll be taken through this table of us.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So you are jumping ahead, but you are the co-founder of a company called Inbox Booster.

Yes I am.

When did you co-found that company and what is Inbox booster?

Nicolas Toper:
We started two years ago when I moved here from France. And what we're doing is we're doing, actually it sounds very counterintuitive, but what we're doing is we're preventing email from ending up in Spa because the problem that happens because of all the security measures, a lot of legitimate mail emails are getting cut in spam. And if you are not a large brand, you have a higher chance than a large brands to get cut into the filter for the wrong reasons. And one of that is you don't know what's happening, you don't know what to do and you dunno how to do it because it's actually a little bit more complicated. And again, think about, I'll make the YouTube analogy that you started with. If you want your content on YouTube to reach, to have a great reach, there is certain steps you need to do.

And if you don't follow those steps, yeah, it's not going to go anywhere. It might but it'll take longer. And if you had done the right step from the start, it would've worked out better. So it's always the same thing with email. You need to know those things and you need certain types of tooling to get into the right place. The security part is mostly handled, but the false positive part, this is how it's called, is not handled very well by spam features and by major emailers. And one of the reason is they don't need to because actually receiving emails. But for instance, if you check your spam box right now, you'll see that you probably have one email per day that shouldn't be in it. That's what you're seeing. What we're seeing.

Jon Pfeiffer:
What percentage of people actually check their junk or spam email folders?

Nicolas Toper:
It's only professionals now. So on Outlook it happens a lot more. It has issues but on Gmail and nobody's checking it, it's actually hard to get into it. You need to kind of click to touch to press a couple of buttons to get into it. So nobody really knows. I mean Outlook knows and Gmail knows, but it's not a lot. It's really insignificant. So if it's in spam promotion, actually people are going to read into it. But spam like Gmail, if it's in spam, it's the same as not being sent. So I'm a

Jon Pfeiffer:
Lawyer and I

Nicolas Toper:
Always

Jon Pfeiffer:
Check just because.

Nicolas Toper:
So as

Jon Pfeiffer:
Lot of broad emails there are, but I still check just in case. How many emails do you recover? Not

Nicolas Toper:
The norm. And how many emails do you recover from the Spam filler?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Oh, one a day.

Nicolas Toper:
Yeah, so say my start. So the thing is as a lawyer it's different because you live, that's how I pronounce it. You live on an email and that's kind of your job. So it's a big deal. But for most people they will never, and I'm not even sure, you check your personal mailbox for first one filter

Jon Pfeiffer:
Inbox booster, you have a co-founder who is whom?

Nicolas Toper:
Marcus. He's in

Jon Pfeiffer:
Switzerland. And how did, you're from Paris, where's he from?

Nicolas Toper:
He's actually, he's from Sweden, but he lives in Switzerland, which is to make his

Jon Pfeiffer:
Complex. What's your origin story? How did you guys get together?

Nicolas Toper:
So this is a very tech thing we met, so he was a customer in my previous business and I was just starting, he just started out his business and so we get to talk and we're like, oh yeah, we'd like to work with each other. And when it happened, and then when he sold his business, I sold my previous business too. And then we kind got in, oh, also we got to an incubator called Y Combinator and we did after the first and I got in by myself, I was by myself at this time on this business and after the first meeting I was like, wow, what he wants to do is too hard. I need to find someone who's free. Marcus, I like him, I really respect him as a person. So let's see if we can work together. And it's been a couple of, how does

Jon Pfeiffer:
Inbox boost without getting too far down in the weeds, how does inbox booster work and what's the advantage of using it?

Nicolas Toper:
First of all, you don't really know if you're in spam. Now if you send an email, you don't really know how it's going to be received and all that. So for marketing email, for a personal email, it'll be different. But for marketing email, you don't know. So if you say you need to send an email to even a thousand people, it's really important to test it. And if you test it yourself, the filters are smart enough to know that you want to receive your own email. So it's not really relevant. So you need to send it to a pristine new address and that's what we do for you. And so we're going to test it on a new address that we know has never received this type of emails before. And so you'll have as much good results as you can get. So you'll get this answer.

So that's important. That's the first thing we'll do. And that's free. You have a free test, press free test per day for free. You don't even need to sign up, just send your emails to us and we'll take it. So in any cases, each time you send a newsletter, you absolutely need to do this type of test. If you don't, you will have some problems at some point. The second thing is what we do is we're also going to identify where if you have problems, where they are. So we're going to analyze if you're security, like the DNS is correct, configured if your plumbing is correct. And then if you're in spam also, and we're the only one who can tell you, we're going to tell you why you're in spam, is this because the words you're using in your email are actually creating your problems, which happens sometimes we have that or is this because of your past behavior?

Like you've sent email that were not well received to the spam filter send, you send all of your subsequent email to spam. So that's what we're going to tell. And if you send just one email, then we'll tell you if you're in spam or not. And if you're in spam, then why? And then you can read some online blogs. We have past we have that explain how to fix it or you can give us money to fix it free or with you actually. But in all cases you do need to send your emails to test your email. That's the first step. And then if there are a problem, it's really, really important to figure out where it's coming from because sometimes in a lot of times actually has nothing to do with you and you just need to remove a couple of words and you're in it. And now to do how it's working. Technically what we do is we send a lot of test emails to the spam filters so we can figure out what element is triggering it. So it's called, it's actually a general field called ai interoperability. The spam filter is really a big ai. So it's really figuring out actionable insight to why it's reacting the way it's reacting.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Are there some words that you can just tell if they're in an email, they're going to immediately trigger that it's spam?

Nicolas Toper:
No, this used to be the case and you can see online a lot of spam words, but they actually don't work. And I run this experiments. It's not that there is no words like that. It's really something that's learning all the time. And so it's offloading some of its rule and reloading some new ones. And it's also more complicated because it's a combination of who you are and what you're sending. So it's more complicated

Jon Pfeiffer:
And

Nicolas Toper:
There is no rules. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense. Often it doesn't make sense. You just need to remove some stuff.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How often do the different platforms, and when I say platforms, I'm talking maybe Apple Mail or Gmail or Yahoo or Outlook. How often do they change their, I don't even know if it's called an algorithm. How often do they change the filter? So you have to continually chase what they're changing.

Nicolas Toper:
So we don't really chase what they're doing. So they've changed their algorithm, probably a big change a couple of months and all the time now it depends what you mean by algorithm. They have, the way it's working, it is like ai. So they have an AI that write the algorithm, that write the algorithm, that write the algorithm. So you have different layers there and they're changing. So some of them, like the bottom ones are being changed all the time. And then the top ones are changed once in a while. The reason, but we don't chase, what we do is we really ask the spam filter so we can present information and say, Hey, is this spam for you or not? So for instance, send an email, we know it's in spam, we take the same email, we'll send it from one of our good sanders and we'll see if it's still in spam or not. And if it's still in spam, we conclude that your diamond is flagged from the spam filter.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So where can people find you if they wanted to use your service, where can they find you?

Nicolas Toper:
An inbox booster.com. This could go inbox booster.com. They can sign up there and they can use the tool for free and they can also talk to me if they need.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay, thank you. I'll be right back. This has been great.

Nicolas Toper:
Thank you.