Another M3AAWG on the books

Another M3AAWG is over. It was great to see old friends, some of whom I’ve known for more than a decade. It was even better to meet new people who I’m sure will become old friends. The conference has grown so much bigger than my first MAAWG back in San Diego (MAAWG 3 in 2005). That was maybe a hundred people. Today M3AAWG has more members companies than were at the original conference.
I’m still processing all the information from the conference. I learned a lot of new things. I had some of my knowledge confirmed. I’ve had some of my beliefs challenged.
It’s always great to see everyone. And thank you for everyone who went out of your way to tell me you read the blog. It’s great to know that I’ve made some of you think and helped you learn and given you backup when you need to talk to bosses or customers.
Regular blogging resumes tomorrow.
Sláinte
 
 

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2016 Mary Litynski Award

The Mary Litynski Award is presented by M3AAWG to people who have done extensive work outside the public eye over a significant period of time. At the Dublin conference the award was presented to Rodney Joffe. A lot of other people will talk about Rodney’s accomplishments, including his role in the founding of Genuity, his work with the DMA in the early days of spam, his efforts against SMS spam and his efforts to secure the Internet infrastructure. But I have a much more personal perspective.
Rodney was seminal in changing my life and career path. Back in 1999, Rodney asked Steve to look into some DNS creativity he was testing. A few months later, Rodney invited Steve to join a new company he was founding based on that DNS creativity. We moved out the the Bay area and Steve started working for UltraDNS in early 2000.
Moving out to the Bay Area triggered my career shift into anti-spam and anti-abuse. I started working at MAPS (now Trend Micro) in their experimental consulting service division. We were the “carrot” end of the equation, where our job was to help companies minimize the abuse coming out of their networks.
After MAPS went through a round of layoffs in 2001, Rodney started recommending me as an email consultant to some of his connections in the marketing world. This work was a success and directly led to the founding of Word to the Wise and everything that flows from that.
M3AAWG has published a video where Rodney discusses his role in the history of spam and some of the other things he’s done to fight junk advertising (both fax and SMS spam). He sued junk faxers in small claims court. He was instrumental in getting SMS spam covered under the TCPA. He wrote the first global opt-out list supported by both the DMA and the ISPs and proved that global opt-out would never work. He literally pulled the plug on spamming customers.
Rodney says he’s “Not smart, just the guy who carries the bags of money and helps the smart people get things done.” I certainly don’t believe that is true. He has done things on the global scale to make the Internet a safer place for end users. But my appreciation is much more personal. I will forever be grateful to him for starting us on this path and the help and advice he gave us so many years ago.

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May 2015: The Month in Email

Greetings from Dublin, where we’re gearing up for M3AAWG adventures.
In the blog this month, we did a post on purchased lists that got a lot of attention. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about purchased lists — they perform poorly and cause delivery problems, and we always advise clients to steer clear. With your help, we’ve now compiled a list of the ESPs that have a clearly stated policy that they will not tolerate purchased lists. This should be valuable ammunition both for ESPs and for email program managers when they asked to use purchased lists. Let us know if we’re missing any ESPs by commenting directly on that post. We also shared an example of what we saw when we worked with a client using a list that had been collected by a third party.
In other best practices around addresses, we discussed all the problems that arise when people use what they think are fake addresses to fill out web forms, and gave a nod to a marketer trying an alternate contact method to let customers know their email is bouncing.
We also shared some of the things we advise our clients to do when they are setting up a mailing or optimizing an existing program. You might consider trying them before your own next send. In the “what not to do” category, we highlighted four things that spammers do that set them apart from legitimate senders.
In industry news, we talked about mergers, acquisitions and the resulting business changes: Verizon is buying AOL, Aurea is buying Lyris, Microsoft will converge Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail, and Sprint will no longer support clear.net and clearwire.net addresses.
Josh posted about Yahoo’s updated deliverability FAQ, which is interesting reading if you’re keeping up on deliverability and ESP best practices. He also wrote about a new development in the land of DMARC: BestGuessPass. Josh also wrote a really useful post about the differences between the Mail From and the Display From addresses, which is a handy reference if you ever need to explain it to someone.
And finally, I contributed a few “meta” posts this month that you might enjoy:

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Gmail pilots new FBL

Yes, it’s true. Gmail announced last Thursday at M3AAWG that they were piloting a new Feedback loop.
The Gmail FBL is currently for ESPs only. The announcement during MAAWG was that only MAAWG ESP members were eligible. They are requiring a DKIM signature for the FBL, but ESPs using individual customer d= values can get a FBL based on IPs. They are also not providing ANY information that reveals the complainer. Gmail’s intention is only to give ESPs feedback so that ESPs can prevent abuse. They are not giving feedback so complainers can be removed.
The email has a .csv attachment that has 3 columns: date, identifier and complaint rate.
The identifier is an ESP provided customer identifier. One of the ESPs I talked to said they were adding an X-header into their emails.
I’ve heard from beta testers that there is a minimum of 100 complaints before you’ll get any report.
Reports are sent daily if there is sufficient traffic to trigger them.
If you’re a MAAWG member, check the senders list for the signup URL.

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