This month in email: October 2013

laura
Industry
November 1, 2013

What did we talk about in October? Let’s take a look back over this month.

The email industry

A number of things happened this month in the industry. The J.D. Falk award was given to Gary Warner for his work in education. We also discussed problems at SORBS and changes at Spamcop. It was also Yahoo!’s 16th birthday this month.

Delivery and spam

Inspired by conversations with colleagues, I wrote a post about how delivery people are there to help senders. Then I talked about good and bad mail, using mail we’ve received as examples. EmailInform sent me spam, addressed to someone who wasn’t me. A a random RV dealer sent me mail that violated CAN SPAM and mentioned a law that never actually made it to a law. Then the DMA had a bit of a mailing oops, which they quickly apologized for. There were also some examples of not-quite spam, but email that was sent badly or to the wrong person and one example of a well done cold email.

Security Issues

We do regularly talk about security issues and October was no different. The big news was that Adobe had a major security breach losing not only customer data but also source code. Adobe source code isn’t the only thing that leaked, our abacus support address found its way onto phishing lists. Experian was caught selling PII to identity thieves. LinkedIn released a new application that’s mostly indistinguishable from malware.

Legal Posts

In the legal realm, we posted about ICANN going after Dynamic Dolphin for violating their registrar agreement. In response to some discussions, we also talked about the legal discovery process and email.

Spamhaus answers marketer questions

A few months ago, Ken Magill asked marketers, including the folks at Only Influencers to provide him with questions to pass along to Spamhaus. Spamhaus answered the first set in March, but then were hit with the Stophaus attack and put answering further questions on hold. Last week, they provided a second set of answers and this week they provided a third.
Nothing in there is surprising, but it’s worth folks heading over and reading.
There are a couple useful things that I think are worth highlighting.
When discussing spamtraps and how Spamhaus handles the traps.

About that spam suit

John Levine has a longer blog post about the Smith vs. Comcast suit. Be sure to read the comment from Terry Zink about the MS related claims.

Delivery is about helping you succeed

I was talking with another delivery person today who’s dealing with a customer struggling with some issues. As most of these discussions go, we get to the part where we have to tell the customer that what they’re doing looks problematic from the outside. And then the customer gets all upset and angry and starts complaining to account reps or managers or executives.
The challenge of delivery is working with clients who don’t want to hear they have to change what they’re doing. Some senders deflect better than a 3 year old caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
I think all of us in the delivery space, or at least most of us, want our customers and clients to succeed in their email goals. We want you to have a great mailing program. But when your delivery is having problems, getting to a great mailing program means doing something differently.
These changes can be hard, both in terms of thinking differently about email and how it works and about business models. Some business models make it extremely difficult to use emails. We understand that. We don’t make the rules, we just explain them.
We want your mail to work.