Bad data drives delivery problems

It’s a wild election season here in the US. In the past few presidential elections, email has played a bigger and bigger role in messaging and fundraising. President Obama’s campaign used email effectively, but sent  huge volumes. In fact, the volume was so heavy, it led to a joke on the Daily Show.

(Video: email question at the 5:56 mark)
Jon Stewart: “We have been talking here for 12 – 14 minutes. I am curious. How many emails, in that time, do you think your campaign has sent me?”
President Obama: “It depends on whether you’ve maxed out!” Data Driven Email

This year there is a stark difference in how the candidates are using email. Return Path has different blog posts about the success of the Clinton, Sanders and Trump email campaigns which let’s you play around with the data they’ve collected from the different campaigns.
ElectionSpam2
Recently Donald Trump’s campaign has been in the news for different email related issues. He sent his first fundraising email on June 21, 2016. But 60% of those emails went to spam. Some have speculated that the spam was due to a new domain.
That spam rate, however, may not be simply due to using a brand new domain. Recent reports are that email went out to foreign nationals in Iceland, Scotland, Britain, including some government officials. Yes, Donald Trump’s campaign is spamming foreign government officials on their government addresses asking for donations.
I’ve been around the email industry long enough to know that campaigns, special interest groups and elected officials share constituent and supporter data freely. There isn’t really ever anything like informed opt-in when it comes to politics, PACs or political groups. Anything citizens do that lands an email address in the hands of a political group results in that address being shared.

Sign a petition? Address gets shared.

Make a donation? Address gets shared.

Sign up to volunteer? Address gets shared.

Contact an elected official? Address gets shared.

I don’t really expect the campaigns to do only opt-in mail. I do expect campaigns to do mostly opt-in with a side of strict hygiene and well crafted messages that get good delivery. But opt-in isn’t in their nature. Still, this is noteworthy in that the mail went to people that should never appear on a US political list.
With this new information, I’m much less inclined to blame his brand new domain for a 60% email rate. I think it’s much more likely that the problem is the data. Who knows where the campaign got the address list, but it certainly doesn’t seem like it was even political style opt-in.
This is yet another example of how data quality and source directly affects deliverability results. Sure, part of the problem may be the domain wasn’t properly warmed up. But it’s much more likely that the problem was the fact that the delivery problems were the result of using bad data.
 
 
 

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Email as a PR problem

Email is a great way to connect to and engage with people. It is also a medium where the sender doesn’t get to control the message as well as they might in other media. This means that sometimes email campaigns go wrong in a way that drives a national news story about how you are a spammer.
In the stress and flurry of dealing with public accusations of spamming many companies overlook the fact that the underlying issue is they are sending mail that the recipients don’t want or don’t expect. If there is a public uproar about your mail as spam, then there is a good chance something in  your email strategy isn’t working.
Even in the recent White House as spammers strategy, there is a strong chance that they are actually using reasonable and industry standard methods to collect email addresses. However, in their case, they are a large target for people to forge email addresses in forms. “Bob doesn’t like the president, but I’ll sign him up for this list so he can learn how things really are.” or “Joe doesn’t like the democrats so I’ll sign him up for their mailings just to piss him off.”

When you are confronted with an email campaign that upsets a large number of people there are a number of steps you should take.
Step 1: Gather information
This includes information internally about what actually happened with the campaign and information from the people who are complaining.
Externally: Get copies of the emails with full headers. If you’re working with people who do not want to reveal any details of the mail they received then you may not be able to fully investigate it, but if they do you will have everything you need right there. Figure out where their address came from (you do have good audit trails for all your email addresses, right?).
Internally: Talk to everyone who worked on that particular campaign. This includes the geek down in the IT department who manages the database. Figure out if anything internally went wrong and mail was sent to people it wasn’t intended for. I know of at least 2 cases where a SQL query was incorrectly set up and the unsubscribe list was mailed by accident.
Step 2: Identify the underlying problem
Look at all the available information and identify what happened. Was there a bad source of email addresses? Did someone submit addresses of spamtraps to a webform? Was there a technical problem? Again, talk to your people internally. In many companies I have noticed a tendency to try and troubleshoot problems like this at very high levels (VP or C-level executives) without involving the employees who probably know exactly what happened. This sometimes leads to mis-identifying the problem. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it.
Step 3: Identify the solution
Once you know what the problem was, you can work out a solution. Sometimes these are fairly simple, sometimes not so much. On the simple end you may have to implement some data hygiene. On the more complex end, you may need to change how data is handled completely.
Step 4: Inform the relevant parties of the solution
Make a statement about the problem, that you’ve identified it and that you’ve taken steps to fix it. How you do this is a little outside my area of expertise, although I have participated in crafting the message, rely on your PR folks on how to communicate this. In the Internet space, honesty is prized over spin, so do remember that.
Every company is going to have the occasional problem. In the email space, that tends to result in the company being labeled a spammer. Instead of being defensive about the label, use the accusation to drive internal change to stop your mail from being labeled spam by the recipients.

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Memories of Spam in May

This morning on Facebook a friend posted a picture saying that 15 years ago was the very first anti-spam conference (Spamcon*). All we have are some blurry scans of pictures and coffee mugs.
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That 550 sign belonged to the bar where the night out was held. It got bought by K & P and lived in their garden until it rotted away a few years ago. So many folks who are still active in the space, and so many folks who’ve moved on. Names I’d forgotten, faces I haven’t.
Many of those folks are still working in email. Some on the sending side, some on the tools and vendor side, some on the ISP side, some on the consulting side.  That conference was one of the very first times people publicly gathered to talk about spam. There were other occasions, but most were invite only with hand picked representatives of specific companies.
At that first Spamcon I was freshly laid off from MAPS (now Trend Micro). I was considering what next. The thing is, I really liked the work I was doing. MAPS had me leading a team to provide abuse desk as an outsourced service. We had a very large network provider as a customer and we were handling all the mail that came into abuse@ there. It was a challenge, I was creating processes and documenting policy, trying to do more with less and managing my first team ever.
Much of what I do now, here, grew out of that position. It was clear even then there was a need for someone who could help navigate the challenges of email.
In the same thread another person posted pictures from a social night in DC during the FTC Spam Forum. More folks, some I have lost touch with and some who are still friends and colleagues.
We were so young. All of us.
This is yet another form of community that email created. Some of it was built over email, but a lot of it happened on USENET and IRC and local meetups. There were so many ways we built community using plain text and dialup. The technology has changed, and that community from a dozen years ago has changed but it’s still all the same deep down inside.
SpamconMugs
 
(* If, at any point, you see me type Spamconk instead of Spamcon please blame autocorrect. It’s being difficult and even tries to correct it when I go back and edit sentences.)

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Repurposing addresses

Multiple news sources are reporting that Herman Cain, republican presidential hopeful from 2012. Maddow on Herman Cain’s new business model. Apparently, his email address list is for rent by just about anyone, including companies selling cures for erectile dysfunction.

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