October 2014 – The Month in Email

October was action-packed at WttW. We wrapped up some big and interesting client projects (look for some case studies soon!), attended another great M³AAWG conference, and made an exciting announcement that we’re hiring a deliverability specialist. The combination of these frees up some more of my time for blogging, which I’ve really missed. Look for more from me in November and December.

In industry news, we’re watching the new Gmail Inbox with interest. We’ll have more to say on this as we play with it and see how different kinds of email interactions occur in the system. As Business Insider noted in their coverage of Forrester’s research on email marketing, consumers are finding good email marketing more and more effective and interesting. Inbox will likely go a long way to help consumers connect with this wanted email and avoid unwanted email. We also revisited an old post on ISP filters and looked at new ways users can control what gets their attention in the inbox.

Steve contributed a few posts this month on technical issues, including a recommendation for SWAKS, the “Swiss Army Knife” of SMTP testing, and a very detailed look at obscure DNS bugs.

In the world of spam, we looked at the first investigative report to come out since the passage of CASL, which suggests that CRTC, the agency responsible for oversight, is being thoughtful in how it addresses complaints. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this as the complaints come in. As we discuss in this post (and our other CASL posts), the most interesting piece of this will be in 2017, when individuals can begin to exercise private rights of action.

We also looked at a specific piece of spam we received (ostensibly from Pizza Hut) and used it to talk a bit about spam, phishing and malware. With all of the industry discussion about DMARC as a magic bullet, it’s important to take a good look at the limits of technology and where spammers and bad actors will continue to find ways to work around those limits.

Our most-commented-upon post of the month was about a question we get asked regularly: Does Volume Cause Blocking? (Short answer: no, but a change in volume very well might…)

Finally, we looked at various best practices for email use and administration:

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June 2014: The month in email

Each month, we like to focus on a core email feature or function and present an overview for people looking to learn more. This month, we addressed authentication with SPF.
We also talked about feedback mechanisms, and the importance for senders to participate in FBL processes.
In our ongoing discussions about spam filters, we took a look at the state of our own inboxes and lamented the challenge spam we get from Spamarrest. We also pointed out a post from Cloudmark where they reiterate much of what we’ve been saying about filters: there’s no secret sauce, just a continuing series of efforts to make sure recipients get only the mail they want and expect to receive. We also looked at a grey area in the realm of wanted and expected mail: role accounts (such as “marketing@companyname.com”) and how ESPs handle them.
As always, getting into the Gmail inbox is a big priority for our clients and other senders. We talked a bit about this here, and a bit more about the ever-changing world of filters here.
On the subject of list management, we wrote about the state of affiliate mailers and the heightened delivery challenges they face getting in the inbox. We got our usual quota of spam, and a call from a marketer who had purchased our names on a list. You can imagine how effective that was for them.
And in a not-at-all-surprising development, spammers have started to employ DMARC workarounds. We highlighted some of the Yahoo-specific issues in a post that raises more questions.
We also saw some things we quite liked in June. In the Best Practices Hall of Fame, we gave props to this privacy policy change notification and to our bank’s ATM receipts.
We also reviewed some interesting new and updated technology in the commercial MTA space, and were happy to share those findings.

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Email History through RFCs

Many aspects of email are a lot older than you may think.
There were quite a few people in the early 1970s working out how to provide useful services using ARPANET, the network that evolved over the next 10 or 15 years into the modern Internet.
arpanet3
They used Requests for Comment (RFCs) to document protocol and research, much as is still done today. Here are some of the interesting milestones.
April 1971 [rfc 114]RFC 114 A File Transfer Protocol.[/rfc] One of the earliest services that was deployed so as to be useful to people, rather than a required part of the network infrastructure, was a way to transfer files from one computer to another. In the [rfc 114]earliest versions[/rfc] of the service I can find it could already append text to an existing file. This was soon used for sending short messages, initially to a remote printer from where it would be sent by internal mail, but soon also to a mailbox where they could be read online.
August 1971 [rfc 221]RFC 221 A Mail Box Protocol, Version-2[/rfc] had this prescient paragraph:

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July 2014: The month in email

We continue to be busy with really interesting client work. Look for some new posts and white papers to come out of this research over the next few months, but for now blogging has been a bit light while we’re working hard. In parallel with our busy times, we have also been pondering the ways in which the email world illustrates the classic bon mot  “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, and we’ve been revisiting some posts from a few years ago to examine this.
We started July with a nod to a good subscription experience just as CASL, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation went into effect on Canada Day. While companies have another 17 months to put these provisions into practice, it’s a good reminder that periodic re-engagement with customers can be very effective in helping you maintain high-quality subscriber lists. We talked a bit more about CASL here and what protections the law intends.
In stark contrast, we posted about an organization that is doing a less-than-stellar job making sure they’re only sending wanted email. The Direct Marketing Association is a terrific resource and member organization for marketers across industries and channels, but their email marketing practices don’t always live up to their mission of “Advancing and Protecting Responsible Data-Driven Marketing”, and we explored some ways in which they might improve this.
Those of you who have been reading this blog for any time at all know that we tend to talk about wanted mail and unwanted mail rather than the more general category of spam. Marketers tend to think their mail can’t possibly be spam if it’s not offering Viagra or phishing for credit card information, but that’s not really the point — if a customer doesn’t want to read your email about new mountain bikes, even if they bought a mountain bike from you three years ago, that’s unwanted email. Here’s a post we revisited about why customers might not want your mail, and a new post about engagement.
One risk of sending unwanted email, of course, is that customers complain, and that will affect your delivery going forward. We revisited a post about feedback loops, and also talked a bit about addressing delivery problems as they come up rather than waiting for them to resolve on their own (mostly, they won’t!)
I also proposed a bit of a thought experiment around monetizing the complaint stream, and followed up with a second post. There are some good points in the comments of those posts, but mostly I think it’s an interesting solution to addressing risk and abuse at ESPs.
Finally, Steve wrote a short post about our new mail servers and how quickly spammers descended as we set those up. It’s a constant battle!

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