Recent Posts

AOL bounces and false positives

A number of people have been seeing an increase in AOL bounces over the last few days. Some of these are the new rejection 554/421 CON:B1 message. This is, basically, you’ve topped our thresholds, back off.
The other one is a bit more interesting. The error message a lot of people are seeing is 554/421 RLY:SN. Senders should only be getting this error message when they are sending email from a banned address.

Do you have child subscribers?

Al has a short, but informative, post up on Spam Resource about privacy groups filing complaints with the FTC about companies violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Companies who are alleged to have violated COPPA include Nickelodeon, McDonalds and General Mills.
The underlying issue appears to be the presence of “send to a friend” links maintained on kid focused websites. The consumer advocates are alleging that kids don’t understand that when they send things to their friends what they’re sending is actually advertising.
I talk a lot about informed consent, but don’t often touch the idea of consent from minors. But this is a good reminder that there are other laws than CAN SPAM involved when dealing with children.

Emails that make you smile

This summer’s non-work project for me has been training for a 5K run with Fleet Feet in Menlo Park. As part of the training programs we get weekly emails from the store on Monday. As I was reading through today’s email, I found myself smiling and happy. Lisa, who is one of the store owners and writes the emails, is just so happy and bouncy and thrilled to share her love of running and that comes through in the newsletter.
Our group’s primary coach is the other store owner. During runs we often talk about random stuff, and when I tell people I do email delivery, they always start talking about their experience with email and spam. One night I was running with Jim, and we were talking about Jim’s experiences with sending email. He mentioned their ESP and talked about how convenient it was. But then he mentioned he wasn’t sure that they were sending enough mail (which made me laugh hard enough I almost tripped on a curb).
I realized I am not just a delivery expert when I started thinking about all the ways they could increase the amount of email they send, while still maintaining the quality and the friendly feel of their bulk emails. What could they offer local runners that would increase the value of the store to them? The first very obvious thing was a race calendar. There are dozens of local races every week, telling folks about upcoming races and entry deadlines would be a way to contact folks regularly without it always being a “buy stuff from us!!”
What commercial emails have you gotten recently that have made you smile?

Mail.app outs lazy marketers

The default mail client on OS X is Mail.app. In recent versions it does it’s best to bundle threads of email together to make it easier for you to keep track of conversations via email – they appear in the list of messages as a single entry with a badge showing the number of messages in that thread. There are standard ways to track mail threads, but they sometimes get broken by mailing list software, so Mail.app also bundles together messages with an identical sender and Subject line.
That has an unexpected side effect, when it comes to email marketing.

That little “4” badge on the right tells me that this is the fourth time Marriott have sent me this same email (over a period of several months) and there’s really no need for me to open it and read it again.

Reporting email disposition

Most regular readers know I think open and click through rates are actually proxy measurements. That is they measure things that correlate with reading and interacting with an email and can be used to estimate how much an email is wanted by the recipients.
The holy grail is, of course, having ISPs report back exact metrics on what a user did with an email. Did the user read it? Did it stay open on their screen a long time? Did the user just mark it read or throw it away? What happened to the message. Marketers would love this information.
It’s unlikely the ISPs will ever provide this information to marketers. Take away all the technical challenges, and there are some significant ones there are still social challenges to making this data available. Current user contracts protect the privacy of the user, local laws prohibit sharing this data. And, there is the vocal group of privacy advocates that will protest and raise a big stink.
I’m not sure why email is gets the special treatment of expecting the channel owners to provide detailed disposition data. In no other direct marketing venue is that information collected or provided. TV stations can’t tell advertisers whether or not someone watched a commercial, fast forwarded through it or got up to grab a beer from the fridge. The post office can’t tell direct mail marketers whether or not a recipient read the mail or just dumped it in the big recycling bin the post office provides for unwanted messages. Billboard owners can’t tell advertisers how many people read the billboard.
Since we can’t get exact read rates from ISPs, what do we do? We look at proxy numbers.
Read rate directly measures who opened the message. Open rate is a proxy. It’s who displayed images in the message.
Read rate can be measured only by people who have access to the user’s inbox. The ISPs can measure read rate because they have full access to the mailbox, but this requires the user to access the mailbox through webmail or IMAP. Some third party mailbox addons can measure it, but this requires the cooperation of the mailbox owner. If the mailbox owner doesn’t install the reporting tool, then the 3rd party doesn’t have access to the data. Only groups with access to the end users mailbox can measure this rate.
Open rate can be measured by people who have access to the server images are hosted. Senders and ESPs and 3rd parties can measure it if they provide unique image IDs or tracking pixels in their emails. Open tracking does require the cooperation of the recipient – they have to have images on. No images on, no open tracking. Ironically, ISPs cannot measure open rate, because they have no access to the image hosting servers.
Click rate can be measured by people who have access to the server that hosts the website. The same people who can measure opens can measure clicks. Some ISPs can measure clicks, Hotmail used to pass every URL through a proxy they hosted and they could count clicks this way. AOL controls the client so they could measure number of clicks on a link. I’ve heard trustworthy folks claim that ISPs are measuring clicks and that they’re not measuring clicks (any of the Barry’s want to comment?).
Without controlling the inbox, though, senders have to rely on proxy measurements to judge the effectiveness of any particular campaign. But at least email marketers have proxies to use for measurement.

Penkava v. Yahoo: wiretapping

According to stipulations filed yesterday Penkava and Yahoo! have agreed to go to private arbitration. This will happen before September 1, 2013. Also filed yesterday was an agreement that Yahoo! has until September 7, 2012 to respond to the complaint.

The perils of politics

I’ve talked a little bit about political and activist mail in the past. In general, I believe political mailers tend to be aggressive in their address collection techniques and sloppy in acquiring permission.
For the most part, politicians can get away with aggressive email marketing in a way that commercial emailers can’t always. The laws for commercial email don’t really apply to political emails. Politicians and activists don’t have to comply with CAN SPAM. They don’t even have to stop mailing if you opt-out. They don’t have to identify themselves the way commercial emailers do. They trade, sell, barter and borrow voter data, including email addresses.
This doesn’t mean the politicians don’t get blocked. They most certainly do suffer delivery consequences to their behaviour.
Well, today I saw another article talking about the pitfalls of political mailings. According to US News, a number of people who are unlikely to be Republican supporters were reporting that they were spammed by the Romney campaign.
The Romney campaign says it wasn’t them, and that they are only sending mail to people who signed up to receive it. This is possible, the article at US News says that the signups came from an IP address that is part of the Tor network. What is Tor? Tor is a way to hide your location on the internet. Ever watch a crime show and see the master geek track a bad guy all over the world by IP address? That’s basically what Tor does.
It’s very possible someone did find a list of email addresses of people guaranteed to be angry about getting mail from the Romney campaign. It’s very possible they used Tor nodes to submit those addresses the campaign lists. It’s been known to happen, and it’s not like this election is getting any less contentious as we get closer to November.
Forged subscriptions are a problem for every activist and political mailing list. But most of them don’t take any steps to protect themselves from maliciousness. Welcome emails, confirmation emails, audit trails, monitoring can help minimize the chance of subscribing a lot of people who don’t want that mail. Most political and activist groups won’t take that step, though. They’d rather increase lists by any means necessary without adding any controls on making sure those addresses are valid.
The irony is that the first thing activists blame when they do have email delivery problems is their political opponents forging addresses into their list. But they still push back against actually implementing controls and protections against the practice.
As with many things, politicians want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the extra volume that comes from indiscriminate signups, but don’t think that should cause them any problems. It doesn’t work that way in the real world, though.

Recent Posts

AOL bounces and false positives

Do you have child subscribers?

Emails that make you smile

Mail.app outs lazy marketers

Reporting email disposition

Penkava v. Yahoo: wiretapping

The perils of politics

Spamming the wrong person

Asking smart questions

Quick blog housekeeping

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