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Think before you mail

I get quite a bit of unsolicited mail. I mean, sure, we all get a lot of spam, but that’s not the unsolicited mail I’m talking about. I’m talking about from people and companies in the email space. They want to make sure I’ve seen their new whitepaper or article about delivery. Or they have a question about something I’ve written here. Or they are looking to hire me.
All of these things are great. I love hearing from readers, either in comments or in email. We have a valid (unfiltered) contact address here on the blog. My email address(es) aren’t difficult to find. I want to talk to people.
Sometimes some of the people who contact me do actually send spam. It’s bulk, it’s impersonal, it’s not about me or my perspective it’s about them trying to sell something (themselves, their newest product, their company) to anyone who is buying.
If it’s clear it’s a one off I’ll generally just move the mail out of my inbox and forget about it. Sometimes, though, there are hints that this is more than just a one time mail. The email will have an unsubscribe link, or it’s the third or fourth time I’ve gotten mail from that sender or it will be from a PR company. I deal with them in different ways. Sometimes I’ll offer a different email address that I route better, or I’ll just filter the mail based on some unique bit of the header.
The ones that really get me, though, are when the senders argue with me that I should feel special to get their bulk mail. “It was individually sent to you!” “I sent it because you’re such a great resource and wanted to say thank you!” But it was bulk mail, mail dozens of other people got (hint: the email / delivery industry is very small. we talk to each other all the time, if you send mail to more than one of us, we’re going to talk about it).
I have no problem with you inviting me to your event. Or telling me about the latest or greatest thing you wrote. I don’t even mind the occasional one-off bulk mail. But if you are sending mail to a specific person, put in the 20 seconds to personalize it and make it feel like it’s special for me.
A few moments to think and personalize before you send that email will make your recipient much more open to your pitch. This is as applicable to one off mail as it is to bulk.

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Gordon v. Virtumundo, the sequel

I was slightly surprised that Gordon was still pressing on with his case against Virtumundo.
It seems that Mr. Gordon appealed, again, to the 9th circuit.

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About that Junk Folder

I use a pretty standard mail filtering setup – a fairly vanilla SpamAssassin setup on the front end, combined with naive bayesian content filters in my mail client. So I don’t reject any mail, it just ends up in one of my inboxes or a junk folder. And I have a mix of normal consumer mail – facebook, twitter, lots of commercial newsletters, mail from friends and colleagues and spam. (As well as that I have a lot of high traffic industry mailing lists, but overall it’s a fairly normal mix.)
My bayesian filter gets trained mostly by me hitting “this is spam” when spam makes it to my inbox. If I’m expecting an email “immediately” – something like a mailing list COI confirmation or email as part of buying something online – I’ll check my spam filter and move the mail to my inbox in the rare case it ended up there. Other than that I let it and spamassassin chug along with no tweaking.
I’m starting a data analysis project, based on my own inboxes, and as part of that I’m using some tools to look for false positives in my junk folders, and manually fixing anything that’s misclassified. I’ve been doing this for a couple of hours now, and I’ve found some interesting things.

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Opt-in vs. opt-out

Jeanne has a great post up at ClickZ comparing the performance of mail to an opt-in list to performance of mail to an opt-out list.
The article looks at opens, clicks and click through rates over 7 quarters (Q1 – Q4 2010; Q1 – Q3 2011) covering 330 million emails. I strongly suggest anyone interested go read the whole article.
The short version, though, is that the opt-in lists had more opens and more clicks than the opt-out lists. In some quarters it was double the number of opens and clicks.
This data is a strong indication that opt-in lists perform much better than even the best opt-out lists.

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Listen to me talk about filtering, blocklists and delivery

I did an interview with Practical eCommerce a few weeks ago. The podcast and transcript are now available.
I want to thank Kerry and the rest of the staff there for the opportunity to talk email and filtering with their readers.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone in the US.

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We lie more in email than in person

People are more prone to lie over email than face to face.

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Having the same conversation

This morning I was reading a blog post about the failure of the congressional super committee. The author commented

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More legal problems for Boris

Boris Mizhen is once again on the wrong side of legal action. This time it’s not as simple as Microsoft suing him for creating hundreds of thousands of accounts to try and game the spam scoring system. Instead, he seems to have run afoul of the FTC.
This case isn’t obviously about email, but the FTC alleges that companies under the “control or influence” of Boris set up a network of fake news sites to deceive consumers into a free trial for diet supplements. The free trial involved enrollment in a monthly renewal program which cost consumers up to $158.00 a month.
The websites did not make the enrollment process clear and the companies made it extremely difficult to stop the renewal.

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Email lost a mighty advocate

Last night J.D. Falk passed away from stomach cancer. For those of us who were privileged to know him, it was not unexpected but it is still a sad day.
CircleID has a memorial post up.
I’ve known of JD since I started in email in the late ’90s. I had the privilege of meeting him when we moved out to the bay area and he invited Steve and I to the “sushi cabal” – a biweekly get together. We then worked together at MAPS for a short time.
JD will be missed.
ETA: I’ll be adding links as I find them.
JD’s official memorial page: http://jdfalkmemorial.org/
Neil’s tribute: http://www.welikeballs.com/2011/11/jd-falk-bad-pictures-of-good-food.html
MAAWG memorial page: http://www.maawg.org/page/memorial-jd-falk
CAUCE memorial page: http://www.cauce.org/2011/11/jdfalk.html
The IETF expedites publishing of the RFC JD authored: http://www.virusbtn.com/news/2011/11_17.xml. Many thanks to the staff that made this happen. I am assured that JD was told of the publishing before he passed.
Return Path’s memorial. http://www.returnpath.net/blog/received/2011/11/remembering-j-d/
Tami Forman’s post. http://tamimforman.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/j-d-falk/

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IP reputation and the bulk folder

I’ve spent much of today talking to various people about IP reputation and bulk foldering. It’s an interesting topic, and one that has changed quite a bit in the past few months. Here are a few of the things I said on the topic.
Generally IPs that the ISP has not seen traffic from before starts out with a slight negative reputation. If you think about all the new IPs that an ISP will see mail from on a daily basis, 99 out of 100 of those will be bot infected windows boxes. So they’re going to treat that mail very suspiciously. And, in the grand scheme of things, that mail is going to be spam a lot more than it’s not going to be spam.
Some ISPs put mail in the inbox and bulk foldering during the whitelisting process. Basically they’re looking to see if your recipients care enough about your mail to look for it in the bulk folder. This then feeds back to create the reputation of the IP address. There is another fairly major ISP that told me that when they’re seeing erratic data for an particular sender they will put some mail in bulk and some mail in the inbox and let the recipients tell the system which is more correct.
That’s what happens while you’re establishing a reputation on an IP. Once there is some history on the IP, things get a little different. At that point, IP reputation becomes unimportant in terms of bulk foldering. The ISP knows an IP has a certain level of reputation, and *all* their mail has that level of reputation. So bulk foldering is more related to content and reputation of the domains and URLs in the message.
The other reason IP reputation isn’t trumping domain / content reputation as much as it did in the past is that spammers stomped all over that. Affiliates, snowshoers, botnets, all those methods of sending spam made IP reputation less important and the ISPs had to find new ways to determine spam / not spam.
So if you’re seeing a lot of bulk foldering of mail, it’s unlikely there’s anything IP reputation based to do. Instead of worrying about IP reputation, focus instead on the content of the mail and see what you may need to do to improve the reputation of the domains and URLs (or landing pages) in the emails. While the content may not appear that different, the mere mention of “domain.com” where domain.com is seen in a lot of spam can trigger bulking.
 

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