Recent Posts

Confirmation Fails

Yesterday I talked about registration confirmations. Today I’m going to talk about a couple recent experiences with websites and their registration failures.
The first experience was with Yelp. One of my readers decided I needed a Yelp account and created one using my laura-questions email address. Yelp understands that people will be jerks and so sent me an email to confirm the account.

An interesting look at best practices

Which best practice is ruining your business?

Confirming website registrations

Confirming email addresses during a website registration process is a good practice. It stops people from creating fake accounts, abusing resources and using that site as a mechanism for harassment. But simply sending out a confirmation mail is not sufficient to prevent problems, particularly when everything about the process assumes that unconfirmed registrations are actually valid and not problem accounts.
I’ve had a couple recent experiences with companies attempting to use email confirmation, but failing pretty miserably. In each case a website set up a process where a user could register an account on the site. Both sites required confirmation of the registration email addresses as part of the process. But in each case there were some major failures that result in non-customers getting email.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about those two specific cases. I’ll also provide specific suggestions on how not to fall into the same trap and actually send opt-in email.

What a week!

It has been quite an insane and busy week here. So I share with you what’s kept me going much of the week.

Q3 Email intelligence report from Return Path

Return Path released their 3rd quarter email intelligence report this week. And the numbers aren’t looking that great for marketers.
Complaints are a major problem for commercial mailers. In the data Return Path examined, commercial mail made up 18% of the total inbox volume. That same mail accounted for 70% of all email complaints.
Additionally, 60% of the email sent to spamtraps was commercial email.
The combination of complaints and spamtrap hits mean 16% of commercial email doesn’t make it to the inbox.
And, as no surprise to anyone, Postini is the worst performing B2B filter out there. Folks behind postini filters only get 23% of the email they’re sent in their inbox. And 44% of that mail is just outright lost.
Ken Magill article.
DMNews article.

DKIM and Gmail

After they were a a little embarrassed by their own DKIM keys being poorly managed a few months ago, Google seem to have been going through their inbound DKIM handling and tightening up on their validation so that badly signed mail that really shouldn’t be treated as DKIM signed, won’t be treated as signed by Gmail.
This is a good thing, especially as things like DMARC start to be layered on top of DKIM, but it does mean that you really need to check your signing configuration and make sure you’re not doing anything silly.

Spammers are funny

Dear Spammer,
If you are going to send me an email that claims it complies with the Federal CAN SPAM act of 2003, it would be helpful if the mail actually complies with CAN SPAM.
In this case, however, you are sending to an address you’ve harvested off my website. The mail you are sending does not contain a physical postal email address. You’re also forging headers. Both of those things are violations of CAN SPAM. Given you have also harvested the laura-questions@ email from this website, that is treble damages.
Oh, and while we’re at it, you might want to consider your current disclaimer.

Motion to dismiss in Penkava v. Yahoo case

Earlier this month Yahoo filed a motion to dismiss in the Penkava v. Yahoo. This is the class action lawsuit where an Alabama resident is attempting to sue Yahoo for violation of the California wiretapping law.
Here’s the short synopsis.
People send mail to Yahoo. Yahoo “creeps and peeps” on that mail so they can profit from it. Plaintiff doesn’t like this, and thinks that he can use the California Invasion of Privacy Act (“CIPA”), (Cal. Penal Code § 630, et seq;) to stop Yahoo from doing this. Additionally, there is a whole class of people who live in every state but California who have also been harmed by Yahoo’s actions. The plaintiff would like the court to make Yahoo stop doing this. (First Amended Complaint)
Yahoo’s motion to dismiss is actually pretty dry and there aren’t really any zinger pull quotes that make sense without reading the whole 35 pages. The short version is that what Yahoo is doing is not a violation of California law, it is simply handling email as it has to be done to get it to recipients. Plus, California law cannot apply to mail sent from a non-CA resident to a non-CA resident because that would violate the dormant commerce clause. The class as defined makes no sense. Finally, the plaintiff continues to send mail to Yahoo addresses knowing the mail is being “scanned” and that is implicit permission for Yahoo to do it.
In the initial complaint there was an allegation that Yahoo’s behaviour was a violation of Federal and/or California Wiretapping laws. These allegations appear to have been dropped in the First Amended Complaint.
Right now there is a hearing scheduled for March 13, 2013. I’ll keep an eye on the filings.

For the spammer that has everything

Sales are everywhere on Black Friday, even in the spammer underground.

HT: Brian Krebs

Thanks

It’s thanksgiving here in the US and most of us are off eating way to much food with family and friends. But that doesn’t mean I can’t take a few minutes to give thanks.
I am thankful for reasonably effective spam filters.
I am thankful for ESPs and ISPs who actually take action on complaints.
I am thankful for the unsung folks who keep email useful.
I am thankful for my readers who tell me they enjoy, even if they don’t agree with, my blog posts.
For all my US readers, enjoy your holiday. For all my non-US readers, check back Monday for more posts.