Recent Posts

Political insanity with email

In one of the more boneheaded email related moves I’ve seen from a political group ever the Obama / Biden campaign has announced that people can go to their website, enter in the email address of a Republican friend, pay some money, and the campaign will send an email to your (soon to be ex-) friend on your behalf.

Email marketing OF THE FUTURE!

ISPs are continually developing tools for their users. Some of the newer tools are automatic filters that help users organize the volumes of mail they’re getting. Gmail released Priority Inbox over a year ago. Hotmail announced new filters as part of Wave 5 back in October.
All of these announcements cause much consternation in the email marketing industry. Just today there was a long discussion on the Only Influencers list about the new Hotmail filtering. There was even some discussion about why the ISPs were doing this.
I think it’s pretty simple why they’re creating new tools: users are asking for them. The core of these new filters is ISPs reacting to consumer demand. They wouldn’t put the energy into development if their users didn’t want it. And many users do and will use priority inbox or the new Hotmail filtering.
Some people are concerned that marketing email will be less effective if mail is not in the inbox.

The Constitutionality of SOPA

Lawrence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, says SOPA violates the first amendment.

Court rules blogger is not a journalist

Last week a federal judge ruled a blogger, Crystal Cox, was not a journalist and not subject to first amendment protections. I haven’t been following the case very closely, but was a little concerned about the precedent and the liability for people like me who blog.
Reading some of the articles on the case, though, I’m less worried. This isn’t a blogger making some statements. Instead, Ms. Cox acted more like a stalker and harasser than a reporter. The judge even concluded that had she been granted protection as a journalist it was unlikely she could prevail as there was little factual basis for her statements.
Others have done better summaries of the case and the effect and I encourage everyone to read them.
Seattle Weekly
New York Times
Ars Technica
Forbes

I also discourage folks from applying this ruling to all bloggers. It’s not clear she was doing anything journalistic. I did find it interesting that some of her techniques to ruin the lawyer’s search results were defined as Search Engine Optimization. I’ve long thought SEO was akin to spam: say something often enough in enough places and you start to dominate the conversation. Not because you have anything useful to say, but because no one can get an idea in otherwise.

Cyber Monday

There seemed to be a surge of email marketing trumpting Cyber Monday Sales in big, glossy lettering in the week before Cyber Monday – so much so that I was bored of the whole thing long before the sales actually started. I wondered whether there actually was a big increase in volume of mail, or whether it was just louder, pushier and more noticeable.
So I went through my inbox and categorized the legitimate email I received, pulling out the consumer adverts from the personal mail, work-related commercial mail and so on, and charted it for the past couple of months, broken down into adverts for books, software, “tech” – consumer electronics / computer equipment / software etc., and everything else.
The vertical grid marks each Monday, including the obvious spike on Cyber Monday, November 28th. The regular cycle of junk mail early in the work week, followed by quiet over the weekend is pretty clear. And sure enough, there’s a significant increase on Cyber Monday and the few days beforehand, dominated by consumer goods, tech and otherwise.
Excluding high traffic discussion lists, the mail I was sent over the period of this chart was:

SOPA / PIPA

I’ve not mentioned anything about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and it’s companion bill the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) that are currently making their ways through Congress. Both bills put a lot of obligation on the ISPs to stop bad traffic on the Internet. Unfortunately, it seems no one writing the bill asked anyone with technical or operational experience for input. Many of the obligations are going to significantly impact ISP functioning and will probably degrade service for users.
The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group sent a letter to congress yesterday (PDF link), outlining the issues with SOPA and PIPA. I found it explained the bills and the flaws much better than many other summaries.

Yahoo awarded $610 million

The Federal district court in New York awarded Yahoo $610 million dollars in a suit they filed in 2008.

Bounce handling simplified

I am a strong believer that bounce handling should be designed to remove addresses that have no human on the other end while not removing addresses that have a real recipient on the other end.
Bounce handling should be designed to appropriately manage your subscriber base. Delivery problems are the consequence if you don’t do that. They shouldn’t be the reason you bounce handle, though.
Context matters.
My experience tells me that senders that think about the impact of their sends can do things that “break the rules” while still being respectful of their subscribers and still see good delivery.

Email fingerprinting

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about what I mean by email fingerprinting. It means that I’m able to tell these 4 emails were all sent by the same entity. The domains are (mostly) different, the To: addresses are different, but I get hundreds of these emails a day.

Looking towards the future

I had the opportunity to go to a seminar and networking event hosted by Return Path yesterday evening. The topic was “Email trends in 2012” and it was presented by Tom Sather.
If any of you get the opportunity to go to a talk presented by any of the Return Path folks I encourage you to do so. They know their stuff and their presentations are full of good information.
One of the trends mentioned is the increase in reliance on domain reputation. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. I wrote a little bit about it recently, but have focused more on the whole realm of content filtering rather than just domain reputation.
Domain reputation is where delivery is going. And I think a lot of senders are going to struggle with delivery as they find that IP reputation is not enough to get into the inbox.