Spam judgment not covered by insurance

Earlier this month a judge ruled that two insurance policies held by Scott Richter’s Media Breakaway were not liable to pay $6M in damages awarded in a previous case.
Myspace initially sued Media Breakaway in 2007 for allegedly using phished Myspace accounts to send emails advertising Media Breakaway websites. In summer 2008 and arbiter ruled in favor of Myspace and against Media Breakaway. After the ruling, Media Breakaway attempted to have insurance cover the fine. The insurance company denied the claims so Media Breakaway took them to court. Media Breakaway lost.
Scott has been around in the email marketing arena for a very long time. He’s had multiple run ins with the law, including a 2003 felony theft charge for stealing a number of things, including a Bobcat loader and a 2004 suit brought against him by the NY Attorney General’s office and Microsoft for spamming and deceptive advertising. That court case bankrupted his previous company, OptInRealBig. Scott has also appeared on the Daily Show, in a side-splittingly funny story about spam and email marketing…. er… high volume email deploying.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Email Trouble
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		Political HumorJoke of the Day

Have a great weekend all. It looks like I’m going to get the blog carnival post out Wednesday or Thursday next week so if you have a late entry feel free to drop it to me before then.
HT: Venkat

Blog carnival deadline
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What Mark Said

Mark Brownlow skewers the arguments from opt-out proponents. A definite must read.

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12% of email recipients respond to spam

Twitter and some of the other delivery blogs are all abuzz today talking about the consumer survey released by MAAWG (pdf link, large file) looking at end user knowledge and awareness of email security practices.
The survey has a lot of good data and I strongly encourage people to look at the full report. There are a couple of results that are generating most of the buzz, including the fact that nearly half of the respondents have clicked on a link or replied to a spam email. Additionally, 17% of respondents said they made a mistake when they clicked on the link.
The magic statistic, though, is that 12% of the respondents said that they responded to spam because they were interested in the products or services offered in the spam. This, right there, is one of the major reasons why spam continues and is a growing problem. Out of 800 people surveyed, almost 100 of them were interested enough in the products sold by spam to respond positively. There are roughly 1.6 billion people on the Internet, which gives spammers a market of 200 million people for their spam.
Other studies have seen similar responses, that is consumers do respond to spam. Most surveys don’t define spam, however, and given a lot of consumers call “mail I don’t like” or “all commercial email” as spam it’s hard to know what the respondents are responding too. In some studies, some respondents even defined mail from companies that they had given their email address to, but had not explicitly asked for email from as spam.  In this study MAAWG did request how the respondent defined spam. Of the respondents, 60% say spam is mail they did not solicit, and 41% say spam is mail that ends up in the spam folder. Given that 60% of respondents define spam as “unsolicited email” it is possible that some people are responding to mail they never requested.
Sad news for those of us who were hoping that lack of consumer response would make spamming unprofitable enough that spammers would stop.
The crosstab between “how do you define spam” and “how do you react to spam” may be an interesting data set to see.

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Delivery lore

Number of people believing outrageous statements on the Internet
(Image from Bad Astronomy)
Almost every delivery consultant, delivery expert or deliverability blog offers their secrets to understanding spam filters. As a reader, though, how do you know if the author knows what they’re talking about? For instance, on one of the major delivery blogs had an article today saying that emails with a specific subject line will not get past spam filters.
This type of statement is nothing new. The lore around spam filters and what they do and do not do permeates our industry. Most of the has achieved the status of urban legend, and yet is still repeated as gospel. Proof? I sent an email with the subject line quoted in the above blog post to my aol, yahoo, gmail and hotmail accounts. Within 3 minutes of sending the email it was in the inbox of all 4 accounts
I can come up with any number of reasons why the email ended up in my inbox, rather than being caught by spam filters as the delivery expert originally claimed. But none of those reasons really matter. The expert in question is spreading delivery lore that is demonstrably false. Emails with that subject line will get through spam filters. I even added an extra 4 exclamation points in the subject line.
Not all delivery lore is true. In fact, most lore involving “always” “all” “never” or “none” is not going to be true. Just because you read it on the internet, and because it came from someone claiming to know what they’re talking about does not absolve individual senders from critically thinking about the information.

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