Recent Posts

Denial

I come up against a lot of denial when talking with people about spam and email. It makes sense, nobody likes spam. Nobody wants to send spam. And I do understand the initial denial when they hear “you’re mail looks like spam” or “you spammed me.”
It often takes overwhelming evidence to convince some senders that their mail is spam. I’ve talked before about some of my clients who insist that I just “forgot” I signed up for their mail. But these aren’t the only excuses I hear.
A sender that denies all feedback about their mailing program isn’t a very good sender, though. The best thing any sender can do when faced with information is to think about why a recipient might not want their mail.
I often describe my role as a translator between marketers and IT folks. I can translate technology to marketing and back again. One of my other major roles, though, is translating uncomfortable or unwelcome recipient feedback. Many marketing programs have been significantly improved because the program maintainers took a minute to look at the feedback and use it.

MAAWG statement on email appending

MAAWG has published their position statement on email appending. It’s pretty explicit in it’s condemnation of the practice.

Spammer prosecuted in New Zealand

Today (well, actually tomorrow, but only because New Zealand is on the other side of the date line) the NZ Department of Internal Affairs added a 3rd statement of claim against Brendan Battles and IMG Marketing. This third claim brings the total possible fines to $2.1 million.
Brendan is a long term spammer, who used to be in the US and moved to New Zealand in 2006. His presence in Auckland was noticed by Computerworld when a number of editors and staffers were spammed. When contacted by the paper, Brendan denied being involved in the spam and denied being the same Brendan Battles.
New Zealand anti-spam law went into effect in September 2007. The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 prohibits any unsolicited commercial email messages with a New Zealand connection, defined as messages sent to, from or within New Zealand. It also prohibits address harvesting.
The Internal Affairs department also appears to be investigating companies that purchased services from Brendan Battles.

By creating web domains that contained commonly mistyped names, the investigators received emails that would otherwise not be delivered.
Over six months they grabbed 20GB of data made up of 120,000 wrongly sent messages. BBC News
Read More

ESPs, complaints and spam

Steve wrote a while back about how Mailchimp handled his complaint.
Sadly, I have a counter example from recently.

Silly spam subject line of the day

It’s Friday, it’s been a long week and while I have things to say I’m looking for some entertainment.
What are your favorite spam subject lines?
Here are some of mine:
“Having rock-like winky is easy”(OK, I admit, sometimes I’m 12 and “winky” makes me laugh)
“-Enlarge-your ~Penis up to 3 per month!” (Up to three what per month? And every month?)
“-Its all about the bra-” (From yourscalecars, advertising penis enlargement. Uh. Really?)
“!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” (apparently spammers never got the memo that !! is bad in a subject line)
“Adventures of my giant mighty soldier” (uh. back to being 12)
“Aliens spotted” (I always thought aliens were striped)
“allergic to almonds or pecans?” (well, no, but thanks for trying)
“anxiety’s archduke Bourbaki’s” (uh. What?)
And, well, I’ve gotten through the a’s in my spamfolder and there are something like 200,000 messages still to go.
Do share some of your own in the comments!

20% of email read on mobile phones

According to data published by Litmus this week.

It's easy to be a sloppy marketer

Sometimes marketers are just sloppy.
Take, for example, an email I received today from a company.
I wasn’t expecting it (sloppy #1).
I never consciously signed up for it (sloppy #2). Apparently I’d bought a package they sold through Appsumo and they claim I asked for future offers. If I did, I didn’t mean to.
The email itself used a template from the sender’s ESP, but whomever wrote the copy didn’t actually proof read it (sloppy #3).

A recipient's view on engagement

I found a blog post from a technical type talking about email engagement. This is a non-marketing way to do things, and probably won’t work for many marketing programs. But I think good marketers should be listening to what their recipients say, even if it’s counter-intuitive.
Edit 9/15: the website seems to have expired so I changed the link to the google cache of the article.

Appeals court rules in e360 v. Spamhaus

On August 30, 2007 I wrote my very first blog post: 7th Circuit court ruling in e360 v. Spamhaus. Today, 4 years later (almost to the day) that case may finally be over.