Recent Posts

Deliverability of Facebook.com email addresses

Christopher Penn at What Counts did some testing to see what delivery to Facebook.com addresses looks like. It looks pretty grim.

Address verification

In the comments on my Address Verification in Real Time Ken asks:

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about phishers is how incredibly creative they can be in writing text that encourages recipients to open their emails.
There have been two separate incident recently that inspired me to talk about phishing.
The first was watching viruses propagate through my local neighborhood mailing list. I live in Silicon Valley and we do have an email list for neighbors to talk, plan and generally share information. Last week one of the neighbors got infected with a virus, and their address started posting links to more viruses to the list. Over the weekend I watched half a dozen neighbors get infected and post more viruses to the list.
The second is the dozens of messages I’ve been receiving telling me there are naked photos of me on the Internet. They have a couple different forms. Some pretend to be concerned friends worried that my private photos have leaked. Others threaten legal action or that the police are investigating me. Still others tell me I’ve ruined a friendship by sharing these photos.
None of those things are true, of course. They’re all trying to get me to open a file and infect my machine with some virus or another.

Engagement in email

From Tim Roe at eConsultancy.com: Is engagement email marketing finally here?
Tim lays out a number of factors for why engagement is important in email marketing and how to use engagement to improve ROI.

A quick comment on commenting

I don’t have a published comment policy. Most people around here are polite enough I don’t think one is needed. There are a couple things I feel I should say, though.

Spamhaus changes

A number of ESPs are reporting an increase in SBL listings of big, well known brands. InterestingSBLs seems to confirm this.
Just on the month of June I see tweets reporting SBL listings for: Disney (again, and again) AAA Michigan, NRCC, the Mitt Romney campaign, Macy’s (again) Facebook, Walmart Brazil, Safeway, Bacardi.
What happened? I think there are a number of reasons for an increase in SBL listings of well known brands.
The first is that botnets are rapidly becoming a solved problem. That’s not to say that they’ve gone away, or that we should stop being vigilant about the spam and malicious mail coming out of them, but that there are more and better tools to deal with botnets than there have been in the past. That means that the folks at Spamhaus can look at different classes of unsolicited email.
I believe Spamhaus has some new mail feeds that let them see mail they were previously not seeing. Anyone who has multiple email addresses can tell you that the type of spam that one address gets is often vastly different than the type of mail another email address gets. When dealing with spamtrap feeds, that means that there is unsolicited mail that isn’t seen by the feed. I know there are companies who claim to have lists of hundreds of thousands of spamtraps, and I don’t doubt that some enterprising spammers have discovered Spamhaus spamtraps in the past. Adding new feeds means that Spamhaus will see spam that they were previously missing due to their traps being compromised.
As well as bringing up new feeds, I suspect Spamhaus has better tools to mine the data. This means they can see patterns and problem senders in a clearer way and list those that meet the Spamhaus listing criteria.
I’m not saying the Spamhaus standards have changed. Spamhaus has always said they will list anyone sending unsolicited bulk email. But, as with many organizations what they could do was limited by the available resources. That resource allocation has changed and they can deal with more senders.
What does all this mean for senders? In a perfect world it wouldn’t mean anything. Senders would actually be sending mail only to people who had asked to receive it. Senders would have good list hygiene and pull off abandoned addresses long before they could be turned into spamtraps.
But we all know this isn’t a perfect world. There are a lot of senders that have lists with years of cruft on them. And not all of those addresses on the list actually opted-in to receive that mail. Many of those senders have good stats, decent opens, low unknown user rates, and low complaint rates. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems with the lists. And those hidden problems may mean that just because you haven’t had a Spamhaus listing in the past doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be one in your future. It means senders who want to avoid SBL listings need to pay attention to list hygiene and dead addresses. It means the source of addresses and their audit trail is even more important than ever.
Meanwhile, ESPs are struggling to cope with the ongoing and increasing SBL listings.
EDIT: Mickey attributes some of the increase in listings to Spamhaus being better able to detect appended lists.

Dealing with complaints

There are a lot of people who abuse online services and use online services to abuse and harass other people. But handling complaints and handling the abuse are often afterthoughts for many new companies. They don’t think about how to accept and process complaints until they show up. Nor do they think about how bad people can abuse a system before hand.
But dealing with complaints is important and can be complicated. I’ve written many a complaint handling process document over the years, but even I was impressed with the Facebook flowchart that’s been passed around recently.

In the email space, though, all too many companies just shrug off complaints. They don’t really pay attention to what recipients are saying and treat complaints merely as unsubscribe requests. Their whole goal is to keep complaints below the threshold that gets them blocked at ISPs. To be fair, this isn’t as true with ESPs as it is with direct senders, many ESPs pay a lot of attention to complaints and will, in fact, initiate an investigation into a customer’s practice on a report from a trusted complainant.
There are a lot of legitimate email senders out there who value quantity over quality when it comes to complaints. But that doesn’t mean their lists are good or clean or they won’t see delivery problems or SBL listings at some point.

Not just you

This morning (9 or 10 am Pacific) my various mailing lists were lighting up with questions about Yahoo delays. A lot of people reported they were seeing Yahoo respond “420 Resources Unavailable, try again later” on connect.
What everyone wanted to know was is if other senders were seeing this.
The answer was a resounding YES.
And, in fact, Yahoo commented on Facebook around 2pm Pacific that they had a mail outage and were trying to bring services back up before close of business today.
As with many things, the Internet rumor mill is one of the fastest and astonishingly accurate sources of information about mail servers falling over.
I started hearing reports that queues were clearing mid-afternoon pacific, but not everyone is seeing that.
So, yes, Yahoo is having a bad day. And it’s not you, it’s not spam, it’s just that some of their mail servers fell over and they’re struggling to accept all the mail headed their way.
It happens.
If you’re interested in hearing more timely updates, I will often announce things like this on twitter when I hear about them.

Gmail filtering

Derek Harding has a pair of articles on ClickZ about Gmail giving their users information about why a particular email message was filtered.
What Gmail Teaches Us about Spam Filtering
Gmail Filtering: The Spam Disposition
Both articles are worth a read. They talk about what we know about Gmail and what we can infer from the data they provide to senders.

Internet fraud and private whois records

The Verge has a long article about Internet Marketing and how much fraud is perpetrated by people who label themselves Internet Marketers.
It was interesting, but I didn’t think it was necessarily relevant to email marketers until I saw this quote from Roberto Anguizola at the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection.