August 2014: The Month in Email

Isn’t August the month where things are supposed to slow down? We’re still waiting for that to happen around here… it’s been great to be busy, but we’re hoping to continue to carve out more time for blogging as we move into the fall.
August
As usual, we reported on a mix of industry trends and news, the persistence of spam, and did a deep dive into an interesting technical topic. Let’s start there: Steve wrote a post explaining Asynchronous Bounces (yes, it’s a GNFAB), with some examples of how they’re used and how they can cause operational problems.
In industry news, we did a roundup post of some Gmail changes and a followup post on security issues with non-Latin characters in addresses. We also celebrated the long-awaited release of a wonderful resource from MAAWG that I am very proud to have helped author, the white paper Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link). We receive dozens of these calls every week, and though we are always happy to help people solve urgent delivery crises, we spend most of our consulting time and attention working with people to build sustainable email programs, so this document is a great “self-service” resource for people looking to troubleshoot blocklist issues on their own.
In other industry and MAAWG-related news, we noted that the nomination period for the J.D. Falk award has opened (you have just a few more days, procrastinators) and took a moment to reminisce about our friend J.D. and his incredible contributions to the field.
On the topic of creating, sending, and reading more attractive email, we posted some  resources from Mailchimp and crowdsourcing templates from Send With Us. We also incorrectly reported on a not-actually-new interface from AOL, Alto. Interesting to note that there’s been so little followup from AOL (and almost no post-launch coverage) in the two years since launch.
We also touched on a few myths: email saves trees and low complaint volume is good.
And finally, in November of 2013, I unsubscribed from every possible email I received on a specific account. I followed up on that briefly in a Part 2 post, and this month went back and wrote a Part 3 followup. Spoiler alert: spam is still a problem. Of course, we got some comments that we were probably doing it wrong, so Unsubscribe Barbie showed up to add her thoughts. We try not to be snarky around here, but sometimes we just don’t try very hard.

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Who pays for spam?

A couple weeks ago, I published a blog post about monetizing the complaint stream. The premise was that ESPs could offer lower base rates for sending if the customer agreed to pay per complaint. The idea came to me while talking with a deliverability expert at a major ESP. One of their potential customer wanted the ESP to allow them to mail purchased lists. The customer even offered to indemnify the ESP and assume all legal risk for mailing purchased lists.
While on the surface this may seem like a generous offer, there aren’t many legal liabilities associated with sending email. Follow a few basic rules that most of us learn in Kindergarten (say your name, stop poking when asked, don’t lie) and there’s no chance you’ll be legally liable for your actions.
Legal liability is not really the concern for most ESPs. The bigger issues for ESPs including overall sending reputation and cost associated with resolving a block. The idea behind monetizing the complaint stream was making the customer bear some of the risk for bad sends. ESP customers do a lot of bad things, up to and including spamming, without having any financial consequences for the behavior. By sharing  in the non-legal consequences of spamming, the customer may feel some of the effect of their bad decisions.
Right now, ESPs really protect customers from consequences. The ESP pays for the compliance team. The ESP handles negotiations with ISPs and filtering companies. The cost of this is partially built into the sending pricing, but if there is a big problem, the ESP ends up shouldering the bulk of the resolution costs. In some cases, the ESP even loses revenue as they disconnect the sender.
ESPs hide the cost of bad decisions from customers and do not incentivize customers to make good decisions. Maybe if they started making customers shoulder some of the financial liability for spamming there’d be less spamming.

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Gmail unsubscribe option update

Brad Taylor has a post on the official Gmail blog talking about the new unsubscribe option. There are two points I didn’t cover here yesterday.

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Unsubscribing is hard

A comment came through on my post about unsubscribing that helpfully told me that the problem was I didn’t unsubscribe correctly.
As you know, there are usually two unsubscribe options in many of the bulk senders emails. Are you unsubscribing from the global or the offer unsub? Unless you are unsubscribing from both, you will still be on the lists.
To address the underlying question, I did unsubscribe from both links for those very few mails in my mailbox that had double unsubscribe links. I know that some spammers use multiple unsubscribe links in their emails. We routinely recommend clients not use 3rd party mailers with double unsubscribes because it’s a clear sign the 3rd party mailer is a spammer.
Given the presence of double unsubscribes I generally assume the point is to confuse recipients. By having multiple unsubscribe links the spammers can ignore unsubscribe requests with the excuse that “you unsubscribed from the wrong link.” Plausible deniability at its finest. The best part for the spammer is that it doesn’t matter which unsubscribe link the recipient picks, it will always be the Wrong One.
I’ve been dealing with spam since the late 90s, and have been professionally consulting on delivery for over 14 years. If I can’t figure out what link to use to unsubscribe, how is anyone supposed to figure out how to make mail stop?
In some cases, the unsubscribe links admitted that the address I was trying to unsubscribe was already removed from the list. They helpfully refused to let me unsubscribe again through their form. But they offered a second way to unsubscribe.
UnsubThumb
The address I was unsubscribing was the same one I was unsubscribing. Some of the emails even helpfully told me “this email was sent to trapaddress@” which is the address in the above screenshot.
I’m sure my friend will come back and comment with “why didn’t you unsubscribe by forwarding the email?” Because I was spending enough time unsubscribing as it was, and I didn’t want to have to try and navigate yet another unsubscribe process. I knew they weren’t going to stop mailing me, no matter what hoops I jumped through.
I’m not saying that all unsubscribe processes are broken, there are millions and millions of emails sent every day with simple and effective unsubscribe links. What I am saying is that there is a lot of mail getting to inboxes that users never requested nor wanted. “Just unsubscribing” from this mail Does Not Work. It just keeps coming and coming and coming.
But of course, the mail still coming is my fault, as I was unable to correctly unsubscribe. 53635233

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