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What blogs are you reading besides mine?

It’s been a week. A very, very long week. Which means that at 4 on a Friday I’m grasping at straws for something interesting to write about. So I do what I do when I’m out of ideas, I look through the email related blogs I’m subscribed to.
A bunch of them are still active, but there’s a good dozen or so that haven’t been updated in months. I realize I’m getting most of my current news from Twitter (or, Facebook) not from my actual RSS feeds.
So what email / marketing / delivery / internet security related blogs are people reading these days? What should I add to my list to keep up to date on the pulse of the email industry?
EDIT: apparently the Akismet filter I use went berserk with the multiple links in comments. I think I’ve pulled everything they caught incorrectly. If you tried to post and it’s not showing, drop me an email at the obvious place.

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Dear Email Address Occupant

There’s a great post over on CircleID from John Levine and his experience with a marketer sending mail to a spam trap.
Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person didn’t actually know their email address. There are a lot of ways spamtraps can end up on lists that don’t involve malice on the part of the sender.
But I can’t help thinking that mailing an address for 10 years, where the person has never ever responded might be a sign that the address isn’t valid. Or that the recipient might not want what you’re selling or, is not actually a potential customer.
I wrote a few weeks back about the difference between delivery and marketing. That has sparked conversations, including one where I discovered there are a lot of marketers out there that loathe and despise delivery people. But it’s delivery people who understand that not every email address is a potential purchaser. Our job is to make sure that mail to non-existent “customers” doesn’t stop mail from actually getting to actual potential customers.
Email doesn’t have an equivalent of “occupant” or “resident.” Email marketers need to pay attention to their data quality and hygiene. In the snail mail world, that isn’t true. My parents still get marketing mail addressed to me, and I’ve not lived in that house for 20+ years. Sure, it’s possible an 18 year old interested in virginia slims might move into that house at some point, and maybe that 20 years of marketing will pay off. It only costs a few cents to keep that address on their list and the potential return is there.
In email, though, sending mail to addresses that don’t have a real recipient there has the potential to hurt delivery to all other recipients on your list. Is one or two bad addresses going to be the difference between blocked and inbox? No, but the more abandoned addresses and non-existent recipients on a list there are on a list, the more likely filters will decide the mail isn’t really important or wanted.
The cost of keeping that address, one that will never, ever convert on a list may mean losing access to the inbox of actual, real, converting customers.
 

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What not to do

There’s a London concert promoter that’s been spamming our old sales address for 5 or 6 years now. I’ve sent in complaints, I’ve tried to unsubscribe, and the mail still keeps coming. They managed to get through my filters, again, this morning. In a fit of frustration I tweeted about how frustrated I was that they would not stop spamming me.
Well, that got someone’s attention. The person managing their twitter account tweeted at me with an email address and a suggestion to send him my address so he could take care of it. I sent the mail as asked and even got a reply.
Unfortunately, the reply was “I clicked the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message for you.”
I dunno, maybe his mouse is a magic mouse and, somehow, the click from that magic mouse will be more effective than a click from my not-magic mouse. I’m not holding out much hope, though. I have no doubt that my sales address will keep getting invited to raves in London long after I retire.
 

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DKIM deployment challenges

Cloudmark has an interesting blog post pointing out some of the challenges of signing mail with DKIM in a large company with a diverse mail system.

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DMARC: an authentication framework

A new email industry group was announced this morning. DMARC is a group of industry participants, including large senders, large receivers and relevant intermediaries working on a framework to reduce the harm from phishing.
DMARC is working on a standard to allow senders to publish sending policies and receivers to act on those policies. Currently, senders who want receivers to not deliver unauthenticated email have to negotiate private agreements with the ISPs to make that happen. This is a way to expand the existing programs. Without a published standard, the overhead in managing individual agreements would quickly become prohibitive.
It is an anti-phishing technique built on top of current authentication processes. This is the “next step” in the process and one that most people involved in the authentication process were anticipating and planning for. I’m glad to see so many big players participating.
 

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Costs and accounting for email

The decision by Cheetahmail to stop allowing customers to use email append caused a very long discussion on some of the marketing lists.  One of the criticisms had to do with what a dumb “business decision” Cheetah was making.
I disagree. Appending, and other non-permission based sending cause a lot of costs to trickle down on the ESP. Many of the large ESPs have teams of 8 or 10 people working to manage delivery, deal with blocks and keep the mail flowing. In fact, I once had a client say “We want to be as clean as ExactTarget” only to choke when I told them how many people are on the compliance and delivery team at ET.
That’s not even looking at the cost of a SBL listing. One company estimated the cost of a slightly less than 24 hour block at over $1,000,000 in lost opportunity costs and in actual staff costs to deal with the listing. I know of one Fortune 20 company who had to re-engineer their entire customer and prospect databases due to a blocklist. And, yeah, that one was actually due to an append. They did an append and the append not only added a “new” address to a record where the person had previously opted out, but that person worked at a major spam filtering company. They experienced a whole world of very expensive pain.
Many ESPs are actually making a sound business decision by refusing to deal with non-permission mail, whether it be a purchased list or an appended list. The sender does not have permission to send to the addresses. That causes all sorts of delivery problems, which costs the ESPs lots of money and staff time to deal with. Most marketers won’t actually pay for the resources they use when appending or buying lists. Then they blame the ESP when their mail ends up in the bulk folder or is blocked outright.
I don’t think many marketers fully integrate the cost of dealing with a poor list into their decisions. My tweet from earlier today “If you have to “ignore all the costs associated with complaints” to find a positive ROI on opt-out mail, is there really a positive ROI? is a paraphrase of one of the things I heard.
ESPs can’t avoid those costs, they’re stuck with them. Lowering those costs by requiring senders to only send to recipients who have given permission is a smart business decision. Marketers don’t pay those costs, but if they even acknowledged them I suspect that there would be a whole lot less sloppy email marketing.

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IP Address reputation primer

There has been a lot of recent discussion and questions about reputation, content and delivery. I started to answer some of them, and then realized there weren’t any basic reference documents I could refer to when explaining the interaction. So I decided to write some.
This first post is about IP address reputation with some background on why IPs are so important and why ISPs focus so heavily on the sending IP.

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What are you validating?

Al throws in his own two cents on the question of real time address validation.

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Can you verify email addresses in real time?

In a recent discussion about spamtraps and address lists and data collection a participant commented, “[E]very site should be utilizing a real-time email address hygiene and correction service on the front end.” He went on to explain that real time hygiene prevents undeliverable addresses and spamtraps and all sorts of list problems. I was skeptical to say the least.
Yes, there are APIs that can be queried at some of the larger ISPs to identify if an account name is taken, but this doesn’t mean that there is an associated email address. Yes, senders can do a real time SMTP transaction, but ISPs are quick to block SMTP transactions that quit before DATA.
I decided to check out one service to see how accurate it was. I’m somewhat lucky in that I created a username at Yahoo Groups over a dozen years ago but never activated the associated email address. This means that the account is shown as taken and no one else can register that address at Yahoo. But the address doesn’t accept any mail.

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Information sharing and the Internet

Many years ago I was working at the UW-Madison. Madison is a great town, I loved it a lot. One of the good bits was this local satire paper called The Onion. This paper would show up around campus on Wednesdays. Our lab, like many university employees and students, looked forward to Wednesday and the new humor The Onion would bring to us.
At the same time, I was internet friends with an employee of JPL. I’d met him, like I met many of my online acquaintances, through a pet related mailing list.
One Wednesday, The Onion published an article Mir Scientists Study Effects of Weightlessness on Mortal Terror. As this was the time when the Internet consisted of people banging rocks together, there was not an online link to Onion articles. But I was sure my friend at JPL, and all his friends, would appreciate the joke. That night I stayed late at the lab and typed the article into an email (with full credit to the Onion) and mailed it off to him.
As expected, the article garnered quite a few chuckles and was passed around to various folks inside JPL. What wasn’t expected was another friend, from totally different circles, sending me a copy of that same article 3 days later. Yes, in 1997 it took three days for information to be shared full circle on the Internet.
Information sharing is a whole lot quicker now, with things coming full circle in mere seconds. But that doesn’t make the information any more reliable and true. Take a recent article in ZDNet Research: Spammers actively harvesting emails from Twitter in real-time.
ZDNet links to a study published by Websense, claiming that email addresses on Twitter were available for harvesting.
That’s all well and good, but all ZDNet and Websense are saying is that email addresses are available for harvesting. I’ve not seen any evidence, yet, that spammers are harvesting and sending to them. This doesn’t, of course, mean they’re not, but it would be nice to see the spam email received at an address only shared on twitter.
Well, I have unique addresses and an un-spamfiltered domain. I went ahead and seeded a tagged address onto twitter. We’ll see if it gets harvested and spammers start sending to it. I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

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