January 2016: The Month in Email

Jan2016_blogHappy 2016! We started off the year with a few different “predictions” posts. As always, I don’t expect to be right about everything, but it’s a useful exercise for us to look forward and think about where things are headed.
I joined nine other email experts for a Sparkpost webinar on 2016 predictions, which was a lot of fun (see my wrap up post here), and then I wrote a long post about security and authentication, which I think will be THE major topic in email this year both in policy and in practice (see my post about an exploit involving Trend Micro and another about hijacked Verizon addresses). Expect to hear more about this 2016 continues.
My other exciting January project was the launch of my “Ask Laura” column, which I hope will prove a great resource for people with questions about email. Please let me know if you have any questions you’d like to see me answer for your company or your clients — I’ll obscure any identifying information and generalize the answers to be most widely applicable for our readers.
In other industry news, it’s worth noting that Germany has ruled it illegal to harvest users’ address books (as Facebook and other services do). Why does that make sense? Because we’re seeing more and more phishing and scams that rely on social engineering.
In best practices, I wrote about triggered and transactional emails, how they differ, and what to consider when implementing them as part of your email program. Steve describes an easy-to-implement best practice that marketers often ignore: craft your mails so the most important information is shown as text.
I re-published an older post about SMTP rules that has a configuration checklist you might find useful as you troubleshoot any issues. And a newer issue you might be seeing is port25 blocking, which is important if you are hosting your own email senders or using SMTP to send to your ESP.
Finally, I put together some thoughts about reporting abuse. We work closely with high-volume abuse desks who use our Abacus software, and we know that it’s often not worth the time for an individual to report an incident – but I still think it’s worthwhile to have the infrastructure in place, and I wrote about why that is.

Related Posts

Where do you accept reports?

One of the things that is most frustrating to me about sending in spam reports is that many ESPs and senders don’t actively monitor their abuse address. A few months ago I talked about getting spam from Dell to multiple email addresses of mine.
What I didn’t talk about was how badly broken the ESP was in handling my complaint. The ESP was, like many ESPs, an organization that grew organically and also purchased several smaller ESPs over the course of a few years. This means they have at least 5 or 6 different domains.
The problem is, they don’t effectively monitor abuse@ for those different domains. In fact, it took me blogging about it to get any response from the ESP. Unfortunately, that initial response was “why didn’t you tell us about it?”
I pointed out I’d tried abuse@domain1, abuse@domain2, abuse@domain3, and abuse@domain4. Some of the addresses were in the mail headers, others were in the ESP record at abuse.net. Three of those addresses bounced with “no such user.” In other words, I’d tried to tell them, but they weren’t accepting reports in a way I could access.
Every ESP should have active abuse addresses at domains that show up in their mail. This means the bounce address domain should have an abuse address. The reverse DNS domain should have an abuse address. The d= domain should have an abuse address.
And those addresses should be monitored. In the Dell case, the ESP did have an active abuse@ address but it was handled by corporate. Corporate dropped the ball and never forwarded the complaint to the ESP reps who could act on the spam issue.
ESPs and all senders should have abuse@ addresses that are monitored. They should also be tested on a regular basis. In the above case, addresses that used to work were disabled during some upgrade or another. No one thought to test to see if they were working after the change.
You should also test your process. If you send in a complaint, how does it get handled? What happens? Do you even have a complaint handling process outside of “count and forward”?
All large scale senders should have appropriate abuse@ addresses that are monitored. If you don’t, well, you look like a spammer.

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December 2015: The month in email

December2015_blogHappy 2016! We enjoyed a bit of a break over the holidays and hope you did too. Here’s our December wrap up – look for a year-end post later this week, as well as our predictions for the year ahead. I got a bit of a head start on those predictions in my post at the beginning of December on email security and other important issues that I think will dominate the email landscape in 2016.
DMARC will continue to be a big story in 2016, and we’re starting to see more emphasis on DMARC alignment as a significant component of delivery decisions. I wrote a bit more on delivery decisions and delivery improvement here.
December in the world of email is all about the holidays, and this year was no exception. We saw the usual mix of retailers creating thoughtful experiences (a nice unsubscribe workflow) and demonstrating not-so-great practices (purchased list fails). We took a deeper look at the impacts and hidden costs of list purchasing – as much as companies want to expand their reach, purchased lists rarely offer real ROI. And on the unsubscribe front, if you missed our discussion and update on unroll.me unsubs, you may want to take a look.
Steve wrote a detailed post looking at what happens when you click on a link, and how you can investigate the path of a clickthrough in a message, which is useful when you’re trying to prevent phishing, fraud, and other spam. In other malicious email news, the CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown.
In other industry news, some new information for both ESPs and recipients interested in feedback loops and a somewhat humorous look at the hot-button issues that divide our ranks in the world of email marketing. Please share any we may have missed, or any other topics you’d like us to address.

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Do you have an abuse@ address?

I’ve mentioned multiple times before that I really don’t like using personal contacts until and unless the published or official channels fail. I don’t hold this opinion just about resolving delivery issues, but also use official channels when reporting spam to one of my addresses or spam traps.
My usual complaints contain a plain text copy of the mail, including full headers and a short summary of the email address it was sent to. “This is an address that was part of a leak from…” or “This is an address scraped off my website. It’s been removed from the website since 2004” or “This address isn’t used to sign up for any mail.”
Sadly, there are a number of “legitimate” ESPs that don’t have or don’t monitor their abuse address. In some cases it’s an oversight or a break down of internal mail handling. But in most cases, it’s a sign that the ESP doesn’t actually handle abuse.
It’s frustrating to watch an ESP post long blog posts about “best practices” and “effective delivery” and “not spamming” and yet not be able to actually stop their own customers from spamming. It’s not even that I necessarily want them to disconnect their spamming customers (although that would be nice) but suppressing the address that I’ve told them was a spamtrap seems trivial. And yet, a month after my first complaint and weeks after escalating to a personal contact, I’m still getting spam.
The 5 things every ESP should do to handle spam complaints.

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