Almost time to vote

I have to admit, the closer we get to election day the more distracted I’m getting. This will be the 8th presidential election I’m eligible to vote in and one I’m following closely. We even watched the 2nd debate live on the trip over to the UK.
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As with the 2008 and 2012 election, email marketing is a huge portion of candidate strategy. Many companies have been tracking how the candidates are using email. Return Path has pulled together a lot of interesting data on their Election Archives, and many other ESPs have thrown their two cents in when it comes to election email.
When this election season started, feels like 10-gazillion years ago now, I started signing up for different candidate lists to see what they were doing with email. I quickly fell behind when so many Republican candidates through their hat in the ring. By that point, I knew other folks were monitoring email and reporting on email and decided to drop the project. I just couldn’t keep up and other people could do it better.
We did comment on the Trump campaign spamming foreign leaders. I think it’s important to realize that deliverability rules don’t get thrown out the window simply because you have an important name or are running for president. A few years ago, one campaign was SBLed on election night and their ESP cut them off. I happen to know the person running compliance there and they supported that candidate but policies are policies.
We also shared a post from someone speculating about how Secy Clinton had access to a private server. The speculation was somewhat wrong, in that the server was already there and set up for Pres. Clinton when he left office. But other than that, much of the other stuff that’s come out has made it clear that email in the State Department was a total mess. I still think a private server was way more secure than an @gmail.com or @aol.com account; it was absolutely more secure than a Yahoo.com account.
This election is important, so I encourage all my readers to get out and vote next Tuesday. There’s more to vote on than just the presidency, too. Here in California we have something like 17 ballot initiatives. Yay, Democracy?
I suspect many folks are in a similar boat and finding it hard to concentrate on things beside the election. So much feels up in the air and important and it’s like we’re all holding our collective breath. After being in the UK last month, I realized how much elections have consequences. The falling pound made it great for us as visitors. But it’s not all sunshine and roses as companies try and sort out how they can absorb a loss in buying power on the open market.
Go vote. It’s important.
 
 

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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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June 2016: The Month in Email

We’re officially halfway through 2016, and looking forward to a slightly less hectic month around here. I hope you’re enjoying your summer (or winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere).
 

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Harvesting Addresses from LinkedIn

There seems to have been an uptick in the number of folks harvesting addresses from their LinkedIn contacts and adding them to mailing lists. I’ve been seeing this in my own mailbox. I’m getting added to different lists and because I used a tagged address I know these folks are harvesting from LinkedIn.
This behavior is really rude. Just because someone accepted your contact request on LinkedIn, doesn’t mean they want to be added to any mailing lists you may have. Let’s be honest, some people have hundreds or thousands of LinkedIn contacts. They’re not going to want to get mail from all of them.
This behavior risks your ESP account. I know of ESPs who have disconnected customers for importing all their LinkedIn contacts.
Of course, there are ways to effectively use your LinkedIn contacts. The short version is think about what you’re doing and how your mail will be received. Don’t grab all your contacts, be selective about who you choose. Have too many contacts to go through manually? That’s not an excuse, in fact, it’s an even bigger argument for not becoming a spammer.
Targeting.
I’ve previously written things you must consider when sending bulk mail to people who have connected with you on social networks.

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