Recent Posts

Can someone explain to me…

What this disclaimer means?

You are receiving this email because you have a customer relationship or have opted-in to an email list managed by the Emailing Entity listed below. This email was not sent to you by the company or website identified in the offer above, for which we have a separate business relationship. We have represented to such company or website that we have the affirmative right to email you with an offer on their behalf.
Read More

Yahoo now auctioning domain names

This summer Yahoo shook up the email ecosystem by publicly announcing they were recycling usernames. The shakeup wasn’t so much that they were recycling usernames, but that they did it in a way that compromised user information and account security. Any user that had an account tied to a recycled Yahoo account is at risk for having their PII leaked. Folks are still dealing with the fallout, both Yahoo and the companies who are trying to meet customer needs by sending emails and protect customer emails by not sending emails.
On top of that, Yahoo announced they’re selling off a number of domains that they’ve accumulated over the years. Some of these are pretty high value domains like webserver.com, sandwich.com and other real words.
I don’t think Yahoo used any of these domains for email, and even if they did any addresses should have bounced off years ago. Still, it does bring up some broader policy issues.
Many, many things online, from bank accounts to social media accounts to blog commenting systems treat email addresses as a unique identifier for that account. Many of these databases were developed with the underlying assumption that people wouldn’t change their email addresses and that it was a static value. This wasn’t a true assumption 10 years ago and it’s certainly not true now. This mistaken assumption is a problem, and one that more and more companies are going to have to address moving forward. This isn’t about email and it isn’t about delivery, it’s about simple data accuracy and hygiene.
Companies must start thinking and addressing email address impermanence. These issues are not going away.

Payday loan mail

Mickey has a great story of what happened when he gave a lead gen company his email address. Over 200 emails in 2 weeks from companies that seem unrelated to the signup company.
It’s this behavior by PayDay senders that causes their mail to be filtered and has caused many, many ESPs just to prohibit that kind of mail on their systems. It’s very much the ugly underbelly of email marketing.

GitHub signup

GitHub is a site where developers can share code with one another. It is widely used by open source developers. Their user base is made up of geeks and people who want a lot of control over their mailbox.
Their email signup process reflects the sensibilities of their market, without being difficult to manage or understand.

What happens when you apply for a PayDay loan

From NPR.
I’ve had clients over the years who were email marketing agencies selling leads to lenders. Their delivery is horrible, even when they’re doing all the “right things” for email. I’ve come to the conclusion that PayDay lenders are a lot like lawyers: “95% of them give the rest a bad name.”
PayDay loans are the one area where content trumps everything else, and so much of the content out there is bad, it can ruin delivery for everything. The NPR article speaks to why that is.

Eggs, ham, sausage and spam.
Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free reign to the free market, red in tooth and claw – just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.
Spam, ham, sausage and spam.
Rule 34, Charles Stross
Read More

Looking for message labs help?

There’s a common bounce error from the Message Labs’ filtering appliance that goes no where.

Getting spamcop summary reports

1) Create a spamcop account at http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=ispsignupform, once you get your password mailed to you, login to the account.
2) Request reports by clicking on “request reports” http://www.spamcop.net/mcgi?action=reqroute. Spamcop takes most formats of IP addresses that people normally use.
3) Reports will come in aggregate and look like:

Tor cleans up their lists

Recently I got an email from Tor. Apparently they’re watching their opens and clicks and they noticed I hadn’t loaded any images recently.

This month in email: October 2013

What did we talk about in October? Let’s take a look back over this month.