Recent Posts

Protecting users from look-alike accounts

Gmail recently started accepting mail (and calendar invitations) with non-Latin characters. A lot of fraudulent emails use non-Latin characters as a way to fool users. Google is on top of these security issues, however, and is now throwing away some mail with non-Latin characters.

Read More

Nominations for the J.D. Falk Award

J.D. Falk was one of the first names I encountered when learning how to read headers and report spam back in the mid-90s. He was one of the folks leading the fight against spam and actively trying to improve the Internet. When I was hired by MAPS I got to work with J.D. and a number of other big-names. One of the things that really surprised me was that this “internet elder” I had imagined was younger than me and with much bluer hair.
After MAPS imploded, J.D. and I carved out separate careers. He went to work at a number of major mailbox providers and I started delivery consulting. Our paths crossed occasionally, usually at conferences, but we also were on a number of mailing lists together. I kept an eye on J.D and his impact on email delivery. In fact, J.D. was responsible for a lot of the modern anti-spam techniques implemented at ISPs.
Eventually, he moved to Return Path where he worked on their Receiver Support group; even as he continually argued against the false sender / receiver dichotomy that so many people endorse.
M3AAWG, with financial support from Return Path, created the J.D. Falk award to recognize people who work to create a better online world. Nominations for the 3rd annual J.D. Falk award are now open. The M3AAWG website has more details.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.”

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

Asynchronous Bounces

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

Read More

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!

Read More

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.

Read More

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:

Read More
Categories
Tags