Links for 1/7

Chris K. at Bronto blogs about in-store address collection and delivery issues. Chris is right, the Spamhaus issue isn’t going away any time soon. And companies collecting addresses in store / at point of sale really need to figure out how to make sure that their data capture is accurate. That means addressing everything from customers giving the wrong address to typos and other transcription errors.
Gene M. at Forbes asks Is Constant Contact the Best E-Mail Marketing Service?. I’m not sure Constant Contact is the best, but it’s nice to see that some people do realize that the occasional compliance incident just means that the ISP is actually monitoring things.
Matt B from Return Path posts his predictions for the new year. While I don’t always do predictions, I agree with all of his.
The Next Web says that Yahoo users are being compromised by an XSS exploit. I have noticed a lot more virus from Yahoo users over the last 2 days, including one person who said their account was broken into while she was on the ski slopes. It may not be exactly an XSS hack, but something is broken at Yahoo and the spammers seem to be somehow getting around Yahoo’s outbound filters.

Canada publishes updated proposed regulations for CASL
More on the Yahoo exploit

Related Posts

More on Yahoo and Engagement

A friend of the blog contacted me earlier today and pointed out that the news that Dan posted about Yahoo and engagement that I blogged about last week was actually reported by George Bilbrey in a Mediapost article on August 1.

Read More

Q3 Email intelligence report from Return Path

Return Path released their 3rd quarter email intelligence report this week. And the numbers aren’t looking that great for marketers.
Complaints are a major problem for commercial mailers. In the data Return Path examined, commercial mail made up 18% of the total inbox volume. That same mail accounted for 70% of all email complaints.
Additionally, 60% of the email sent to spamtraps was commercial email.
The combination of complaints and spamtrap hits mean 16% of commercial email doesn’t make it to the inbox.
And, as no surprise to anyone, Postini is the worst performing B2B filter out there. Folks behind postini filters only get 23% of the email they’re sent in their inbox. And 44% of that mail is just outright lost.
Ken Magill article.
DMNews article.

Read More

Return Path partners with Symantec

Today Return Path announced a partnership with Symantec to improve their anti-phishing product. Return Path is incorporating the Symantec Trusted Domain List into their authentication and filtering product to help customers protect their brands. Press Release
Phishing scams affect everyone, and having a brand that is used in phishing can reduce consumer trust in that brand. Protecting brands in email has been one of the more difficult challenges facing the email community. With the adoption of DKIM and DMARC by major brands and ISPs it has become easier to track and address phishing.

Read More