Back from MAAWG

Today is the first day back at work after a productive MAAWG conference.
The thing I get most out of MAAWG is a greater appreciation for what a large, global force messaging is. The recent protests and uprisings around the world have relied on messaging to organize, share information and communicate. Messaging is also somewhat fragile. Thing things that make it great for strangers to interact with one another also allows bad people and organizations to cause harm.
It is a struggle to minimize the harm while not hurting the good.
MAAWG is comprised of the people that make messaging work. These are folks that are on the front lines in the fight to stop online harm. It’s somewhat humbling to watch a conference full of really smart people, from all levels of responsibility, discuss ways to improve messaging for real users and real people while stopping the bad people. There are good ideas and bad ideas, but discussions are professional and informative. Plus it’s always good to see old friends and make new ones.
I inevitably come back from MAAWG with a load of things to do, new projects to take on and new ideas. This time I’m also looking forward to the publication of a document announced at the conference. The EastWest Institute’s Chief Technology Officer Karl Frederick Rauscher talked about a report they will be publishing next month talking about how China and the US are working together to fight spam.

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Going to MAAWG

Following on from last weeks post about MAAWG, I thought I’d write a bit about actually going to MAAWG. You’re an ESP and you’ve been accepted into the organization. Now you have some decisions to make.

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State of the Industry

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a series of posts on the blog from various authors who are active in the email space.
I posted A very young industry commenting on the lack of experience among email marketers. I think that some of the conflict between ISPs and ESPs and receivers and marketers can be traced back to this lack of longevity and experience. Often there is only a single delivery expert at a company. These people often have delivery responsibilities dropped on them without any real training or warning. They have to rely on outside resources to figure out how to do their job and often that means leaning on ISPs for training.
JD Falk described how many at ISPs feel about this in his post With great wisdom…

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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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