Recent Posts

77% prefer email for marketing

77% of those surveyed preferred email for permission-based promotional messages, soundly beating the next most popular, direct mail, at 9%. Email, still anything but dead.
This, and lots of other interesting things, in ExactTarget’s 2012 Channel Preference Survey.

Read More

The 500 mile email

This is a great story from Trey Harris about a real email delivery issue from the mid 1990s.
Here’s a problem that sounded impossible…  I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. 🙂  The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.
I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.
“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.
I choked on my latte.  “Come again?”
“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated.  “A little bit more, actually.  Call it 520 miles.  But no farther.”
“Um… Email really doesn’t work that way, generally,” I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice.  One doesn’t display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics.  “What makes you think you can’t send mail more than 500 miles?”
“It’s not what I think,” the chairman replied testily.  “You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago–”
“You waited a few DAYS?” I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice.  “And you couldn’t send email this whole time?”
“We could send email.  Just not more than–”
“–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that.  But why didn’t you call earlier?”
“Well, we hadn’t collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now.”  Right.  This is the chairman of *statistics*. “Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it–”
“Geostatisticians…”
“–yes, and she’s produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles.  There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can’t reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius.”
“I see,” I said, and put my head in my hands.  “When did this start?  A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?”
“Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn’t touch the mail system.”
“Okay, let me take a look, and I’ll call you back,” I said, scarcely believing that I was playing along.  It wasn’t April Fool’s Day.  I tried to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.
I logged into their department’s server, and sent a few test mails.  This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own account was delivered without a hitch.  Ditto for one sent to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington.  Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.
But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles).  It failed. Boston, failed.  Detroit, failed.  I got out my address book and started trying to narrow this down.  New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence
(580 miles) failed.
I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity.  I tried emailing a friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle. Thankfully, it failed.  If the problem had had to do with the geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken down in tears.
Having established that–unbelievably–the problem as reported was true, and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file.  It looked fairly normal.  In fact, it looked familiar.
I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory.  It hadn’t been altered–it was a sendmail.cf I had written.  And I was fairly certain I hadn’t enabled the “FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES” option.  At a loss, I telnetted into the SMTP port.  The server happily responded with a SunOS sendmail banner.
Wait a minute… a SunOS sendmail banner?  At the time, Sun was still shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was fairly mature.  Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on Sendmail 8.  And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.
The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs of my now-cold latte.  When the consultant had “patched the server,” he had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing downgraded Sendmail.  The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf alone, even though it was now the wrong version.
It so happens that Sendmail 5–at least, the version that Sun shipped, which had some tweaks–could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most of the rules had at that point remained unaltered.  But the new long configuration options–those it saw as junk, and skipped.  And the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.
One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the remote SMTP server.  Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.
An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched.  An outgoing packet wouldn’t incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side.  So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays.
Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

Read More

The Physics of the Email Universe

We talk a lot about rules and best practices in email, but we’re mostly talking about “squishy” rules-of-thumb that are based on simplified models of how mail systems, spam filters, recipients, postmasters and blacklist operators behave. They’re the biology, ecology and sociology of the email ecosystem.
There’s another set of rules we tend to only mention in passing, if at all, though. They’re the steely, sharp-edged laws that control the email universe. They’re the RFCs that define how email works and make sure that mail systems written by hundreds of different people across the globe all work and all interoperate with each other.
Building a message from Zeros and Ones
RFC 5322 – Internet Message Format
This tells you everything you need to know about crafting a simple email, with a subject line, a sender, some recipients and a simple plain-text message. It’s also the foundation of all fancier emails. If you’re creating emails, this is where to start.
A little more than plain ASCII
RFC 2047 – MIME Part 3: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text
RFC 2047 is one small part of the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) suite of protocols that allow you to include pictures and attachments and prettily formatted text and comic sans in your email. This part defines how you can put things other than the plainest of plain text in your subject lines or in the “friendly from” of your message. It’s what allows you to put Hiragana, or Cyrillic, or umlauts, or cedillas, or properly matched double quotes in your subject line. It also let’s you put hearts or smiley faces or other little pictograms there – but nothing this useful is going to be perfect.
RFC 2045 – MIME Part 1: Format of Internet Message Bodies
This shows how to send an image, or a plain text mail in a different character set, or an HTML mail. It doesn’t tell you how to send plain text and HTML, or to send HTML with embedded images, or a message with an attached document. For that you need…
Finally, Modern Email
RFC 2046 – MIME Part 2: Media Types
This builds on RFC 2045 to allow you to have many different chunks in a message – this is what you need if you want to send “proper” HTML mail with a plain text alternative, or if you want embedded images or attachments.
Getting From A To B
RFC 5321 – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
A message isn’t much use unless you send it somewhere. RFC 5321 explains the mysteries of actually sending that message over the wire to the recipient. If you need to know about the different phases of a message delivery, what “4xx” and “5xx” actually mean, why there’s not really any such thing as a hard or soft bounce defined, just temporary or permanent failures, or anything else about actually sending mail or diagnosing mail delivery, this is your starting point.
The Rest Of The Iceberg
I’ve only touched on the very smallest tip of the email iceberg here. There’s much, much more – both in RFCs and ad-hoc non-RFC standards. If you’re interested in more, this is a decent place to start.

Read More

Best Practices: your mileage may vary

YMMV. One of those abbreviations us old folks used ages ago before email had pictures and the closest we had to social networking was USENET and social gaming was in the form of MUDs. I rarely see it used any more. In a lot of ways that’s a sad thing. It was a very useful abbreviation. Using it at the end of a post full of advice was a sign that the author was providing information but knew that different situations may require different solutions. It acknowledged that what might be the best practice in one form may not be the best for another.
It’s not just the usage that seems to have declined, there seem to be a lot more people who just want to share The Answer! and not acknowledge their experience may not be universal. This seems particularly rampant in email marketing, at least to me (YMMV).
I’ve talked before about how I don’t believe there are any universal best practices for email.
Let’s be honest, the experience of a well known national retailer buying, or appending email addresses is not going to be the same as a local business doing the same thing. The national retailer acquiring email addresses and sending well targeted mail to their purchasers probably won’t cause too many delivery problems, and will generate revenue. The local pizza place probably won’t be so lucky.
A number of marketers have complained that they all too often hear “it depends” when they ask a question about email. But how well a particular email campaign perform does depend. Success depends on the audience and the offer. But more than just the specific offer, success also depends on how well known the brand is and what their real world reputation with customers is.
Customers are a lot more likely to give brands the benefit of the doubt if they like the product. That means poor practices don’t always result in poor results. It also means other companies may not have the same success with poor practices.
Your Mileage May Vary.

Read More

More than just getting past the filters

I’ve been feeling a little philosophical lately. My thoughts are meandering a lot around the whys and the deeper issues surrounding stuff, including email. It means I’m a bit more distracted and less focused than usual. And more prone to pose questions than usual. This was part of the introspection that led me to write the motivating people post last week. I’m trying to figure out how to motivate volunteers in two different realms. And there’s always the question of how do I present a solution to clients in a way that motivates them to take my advice. Sure, I get paid either way, but I really like it when clients take my advice and see success.
There are other places this mental meandering is taking me.
I’m currently working on a project for a client. This particular client is struggling to get mail delivered to a very mobile business audience. In the target field, people change jobs regularly and email addresses can change multiple times a year. One of the things I’m working on for them is how to get email to the right people, that is the people who opted in, when their addresses change so frequently.
This is delivery consulting, but this project really brings home how much more there is to delivery than avoiding filters. Filters are the least of this client’s problem. The real problem is the mobility of their audience. As I was thinking about how to address this issue of mobility, I realized that my job as a delivery expert has gone well beyond telling people how to get their mail past filters.
My job is much more about helping people succeed at what it is that they’re trying to do with email. How can email work for you and for your target audience?
Looking at the broader picture means I’m less likely to focus on the minutia of “spam words” and subject lines and best time of day to send. Sure, there are always tweaks to make in an email. There are always things to test. There are always changes to try. But the effect of those changes is not near as great as actually sending mail that meets the needs of the audience.
Often clients come to me so overwhelmed in the details they forget the bigger picture. I help them find that picture again. My job is much more than getting through the filters, it’s about finding success for clients.

Read More

One Click, Two Click, Red Click, Blue Click

I’ve seen a lot of discussion and arguments over the CAN SPAM rule about whether or not an unsubscribe needs to be a One-Click unsubscribe. It’s gotten so common, I have a stock email I use as a template when wading into such discussions. It’s probably useful for a lot of other people, too, so I thought I’d share.
The regs say:

Read More

Filters and windmills

A colleague of mine was dealing with a client who is experiencing some difficulty delivering to the bulk folder. Said client spent much of a one hour phone call repeating “This is not how a free society works!!”
After the call my colleague commented, “I refuse to get ranty about filter systems.”
I know that filters, and the people who write and maintain them, are a frequent scapegoat for senders. The filters are always the problem, not anything the senders do.
Now, I’ll be the last person who will claim spam filters are perfect, they’re not. Filters sometimes do unexpected things, sometimes they do boneheaded things, sometimes they are broken.
We can’t forget, though, that filters perform a vital role in protecting users from malicious emails. Phishing emails, scams, fake products, viruses are a constant threat. Many end users don’t need to worry about this because filters are so good. But an unfiltered account can get thousands of scams and spams a day (ask me how I know).
Most of us in the delivery space can tell when a filter is working as intended and when there’s an underlying problem. And when the filter is working as intended there’s not a lot of use complaining about them. Ranting about filtering systems often delays a resolution. Senders that focus on what they can control tend to have more success reaching the inbox than those senders that focus on ranting about filtering systems.
Tilting at windmills doesn’t get the mail through.

Read More

What email metrics do you use?

Vertical Response talks about email metrics that are useful on a dashboard.
Metrics are an ongoing challenge for all marketers. The underlying need for metrics is to evaluate how effective a particular marketing program is. Picking metrics involves understanding what the goal is for a particular program. If your goal is brand recognition then perhaps sales and click-through figures aren’t a good metric. If your goal is sales then opens is not as good a metric as average order value or revenue per email.
Measuring email success is important. But how you choose to measure it is a critical decision. Too many marketers just use canned metrics and don’t think about what they really want to know.

Read More

Motivating people

I’ve been thinking a lot about motivating people recently. What really motivates people to do things? Why do we make the choices we make? How do you convince people to do things when they’re unsure they want to do those things?
Let me give you an example. Friends of mine are fostering dogs for local rescues. A neighbor of theirs is trying to start a rescue herself. The neighbor is trying to motivate people by posting pictures of dead dogs in garbage bags. On one level, I get the neighbor’s point: that image is what motivates her to take action. But all that’s doing for other people, my friends included, is driving them away from working with her.
What she needs is a better grasp of how to motivate people. She needs to learn how to speak to people in a way that will motivate them to help her. Unfortunately, she thinks that what motivates her will motivate everyone, except it doesn’t. In fact, it’s doing the exact opposite for some people who are actually sympathetic to her cause.
What does this have to do with email?
I’m often surprised at how many marketing professionals can’t or won’t tailor their argument to their audience. Look at filters, many marketers have told me over the years about how mean ISPs are to them, how the ISPs make poor filtering decisions and how what should really happen is marketers should tell the ISPs to fix their filters.
In very few cases, though, have I seen a marketer actually try and talk to an ISP rep on their terms. It seems so simple to me: marketers are people who motivate people for a living so they should be able to market their own wants to ISPs. They just need to find the right message, but they don’t seem to be able to think about things from the ISP perspective.
I’m not sure I actually have an answer. But how do we motivate people to do things has been a major topic in my head recently. I think the best motivation is often to convince the other party that a given course is in their best interest. The tricky bit is selling that message.
How have you sold a message the other party didn’t want to hear?

Read More

Anti-Botnet Code of Conduct Published

The Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) published a Anti-botnet code of conduct for ISPs. This is a purely voluntary code for U.S. ISPs that want to mitigate the botnet threat to follow. You can download a full copy of the final report from the MAAWG website. The FCC has published a fact sheet about the report on their own website.

Read More
Categories
Tags