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Email templates

SendwithUs is crowdsourcing and open sourcing email templates. These are tested templates submitted by the SendwithUs community and run through the Litmus testing suite.
If you’re in the market for a template, or want to share a great template you’ve designed, check out the SendwithUs project.

Unsubscribing from spam, part 3

At the end of last year, I talked a little bit about a project I was working on to see if unsubscribing from spam would actually work. The address I picked was my first non-work/school related email address. It’s been mine since 2004 or so. I stopped using it for anything commerce related back in the late 90s. But it is on a lot of address lists (as it was used to post to Usenet), and a lot of affiliate mailers have it and it gets spam, despite being behind commercial spam filters.
During the month of November, I unsubscribed from every commercial email that came into the account. In total I unsubscribed from 312 messages. We’re now 8 full months after that, and my spam load on that account is only increasing, it was almost triple that amount in April (908 messages).
Unsubscribing from spam does not work. Here’s what 6 months of spam looks like after unsubscribing from every message received in an inbox on an address that is not currently given to anyone (and hasn’t been for more than 10 years). This is also after it’s gone through my ISP spam filters, which do seem to do a decent job of weeding out the botnet spam and phishing.
UnsubValuesnumbers
This isn’t, of course, any sort of controlled study and I’ve left a lot of details out of this blog post about the address and about how I handled the project. I do want to write it up and publish it, but it’s a back burner project right now.
One relevant note is about 5 or 6 years ago one of my clients wanted me to look at their affiliates and I was able to pull mail out of this box to show them their affiliates were spamming. They put me on the phone with the affiliate. I explained this was an address I hadn’t used since the late 90’s, before their company existed. They insisted I had given it to them or some company they bought. Even after I used the phrase “spam trap” they still insisted I’d opted in and they didn’t have to stop mailing me.
Another note is that while a lot of these are semi-scammy products, a number of them are legitimate businesses and have broad advertising campaigns in multiple mediums, including television.
For all those people that say “just unsubscribe” it doesn’t always work, at least not for addresses that were on the “millions CD” and the “flamers list” from the “Millions CD.”

Low complaint rates are not always good

Digging another old blog post out of the archives. In November 2011, I talked about how part of the Holomaxx complaint against Microsoft and Yahoo said that their complaint rates were below 0.5% and 0.1%. The argument was that if their complaint rates were low, then the mail must not be spam.

Some email related news

A couple links to relevant things that are happening in email.
M³AAWG released the Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link) doc this week. This is the result of 4 years worth of work by a whole lot of people at M³AAWG. I was a part of the working group (“doc champion” in M³AAWG parlance) and want to thank everyone who was involved and contributed to the process. I am very excited this was approved and published so people can take advantage of the collective wisdom of M³AAWG participants.
In other announcements, Gmail announced today on their Google+ page that that they were putting a new “unsubscribe” link next to the sender name when mail is delivered to the Promotions, Social or Forums tab. This appears to be the official announcement of the functionality they announced at the SF M³AAWG last February. It likely means that all users are currently getting the “unsubscribe” link. What Gmail doesn’t mention in that blog post is that this functionality uses the “List-Unsubscribe” header, not the link in the email, but I don’t think anyone except bulk mailers really care about how it’s being done, just that it is.
Also today Gmail announced they were going to recognize usernames with non-Latin or accented characters in the name. Eventually, they claim, they’ll also allow people to get Gmail addresses with accented characters.

Asynchronous Bounces

There are three ways that an email can fail to be delivered:

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!

4 email marketing myths

Tom Sather speaks about 4 email marketing myths that just won’t die. Tom has it absolutely right, these are things people believe that not true.

Fun with new mailservers

I’m building a new set of mailservers for wordtothewise.com – our existing mailserver was “I’ll repurpose this test box for a week” about four years ago, so it’s long past time.
I tested our new smarthost by sending a test mail to gmail. This is the very first email this IP address has sent in at least three or four years, possibly forever:

How useful are feedback loops

Things are extremely busy here and blogging is going to be light for a few weeks. I’ll be reposting some older blog posts that are still relevant for today’s email senders.
Today’s post is a repost from November 2008. I look at the whys and hows of FBLs, address some of the objections people had to them and discuss how senders should deal with FBL mail.
There has been a very long, ongoing discussion on one of my mailing lists about whether or not feedback loops are a net good or a net harm. I believe, overall, they are a net good, but there are people who believe they are not. The biggest objection is that the lawyer mandated redaction of the To: address combined with the fact that some users use the “this is spam” button to delete unwanted email, makes it difficult for some FBL recipients to sort out the real issues from the cruft.
Redaction can be a problem for some senders, particularly for the small mailing list hosted as a hobby or contribution to the community. In order to effectively deal with FBL emails, a sender needs to have tools on the email sending side and on the FBL receiving side. This is often more overhead than the volunteer list maintainer wants to handle. Unfortunately, these senders are a minority and therefore their issues are often not addressed by the ISPs.
Some of the objections and complaints about “broken” or “useless” FBLs come from people who do not really have any history for the FBLs, where they are, what they were designed for and who their target audience is. A bit of history may help explain why things are how they are.
The First FBL
The “this is spam” button evolved from the “notify AOL” button. This button was a way email recipients could notify AOL staff about any number of problems, including threats, viruses and other unwanted emails. As time went on, this was changed to “this is spam” to encourage users to report more spam so the AOL would have the data to make delivery decisions. Eventually, AOL made the decision to share that data with some senders and ISPs. The lawyers made the decision to redact the “To:” address, but not make any other changes to the message because they believe they should not be sharing subscriber email addresses with third parties. As some people correctly point out, the lawyers are not interested in hearing from non lawyers about changing this. It is possible that another lawyer may be able to put together a position paper and convince them this stance is overly cautious. I am pretty sure, though, that no one without a legal degree will be given any audience from them.
Given the success of the AOL FBL and the demand from both ESPs and ISPs for FBLs, other ISPs started offering FBLs as well. Many of them also redacted the To: address, either just following AOL’s lead or under advice of their own counsel.
That means, as senders, we are in a situation where we really cannot make the ISPs change what they’re doing. We can either adapt our own mailing practices to cope with them or we can forego the data provided by the FBL. One of the challenges in choosing to shun the whitelist at AOL that in order to qualify for whitelisting, you have to accept a FBL. For ISPs, who want to whitelist their outgoing MTAs, but have customers sending mail, maybe running small mailing lists, or who are forwarding mail to their ISP account, this can be a problem. However, any ISP needs some sort of abuse desk automation, and this automation should be able to handle FBLs. This can also be a problem for small ESPs or companies doing in-house email marketing. They buy something off the shelf to handle mail (or install mailman) that does not do VERP or otherwise enter the specific address in the email. When faced with a redacted email they cannot do anything with the complaint.
What does the FBL email tell the FBL recipient?
This really depends on what role the FBL recipient plays in the mail transport system. Bandwidth and network service providers use the FBL as an aggregate tool. They really only deal with FBL complaints if there is a change in complaint volume about an IP, they don’t treat each complaint as a valuable source of information. Typically what happens is that an ISP abuse desk notices a spike in complaints. After investigation, they may discover that a customer machine is compromised. They then notify the customer, the customer patches or disconnects the machine and the problem is fixed.
ESPs tend treat the FBL as an unsubscribe mechanism as well as a way to monitor customers. A few FBL complaints are not necessarily a sign that the sender is spamming, but once a threshold is reached the ESP delivery / abuse team addresses the issue. Spammers can get FBLs and often use them as a way to clean lists of complainants. Some really dirty spammers even suppress those complainants from all their lists.
Is a FBL useful?
This is really something that someone else cannot tell you. Some companies find FBLs to be extremely useful, even after they have had to make investments in software (either off the shelf like our Abacus software, or something custom written internally) to send mail that will survive the FBL redaction process and to handle the actual FBL email. Some companies find the FBLs to be more trouble than they are worth. The question, however, is really one only the sender can answer.
Overall, I think FBLs are more helpful than they are harmful. They do require investment on both sides of the transaction, but does encourage senders and receivers to cooperate with one another.

Why don't users want that mail?

Things are extremely busy here and blogging is going to be light for a few weeks. I’ll be reposting some older blog posts that are still relevant for today’s email senders.
Today’s post is a repost from July 2009. I discuss why recipients complain about mail and how senders can lower the complaint rates. While this addresses complaint rates directly, the same series of questions can be used to investigate almost any change in performance.