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Email marketing ulcers for the holiday

I’ve mentioned here before that I can usually tell when the big ISPs are making changes to their spam filtering as that ISP dominates my discussions with current and potential clients and many discussions on delivery mailing lists.
The last two weeks the culprit has been Yahoo. They seem to be making a lot of changes to their filtering schemes right at the busiest email marketing time of the year. Senders are increasing their volume trying to extract that last little bit of cash out of holiday shoppers, but they’re seeing unpredictable delivery results. What worked to get mail into the inbox a month ago isn’t working, or isn’t working as well, now.
Some of this could be holiday volume related. Many marketers have drastically increased their mail volume over the last few weeks. But I don’t think the whole issue is simply that there is more email marketing flowing into our mailboxes.
As I’ve been talking with folks, I have started to see a pattern and have some ideas of what may be happening. It seems a lot of the issue revolves around bulk foldering. Getting mail accepted by the MXs seems to be no different than it has been. The change seems to be based on the reputation of the URLs and domains in the email.
Have a domain with a poor reputation? Bulk. Have a URL seen in mail people aren’t interested in? Bulk. Have a URL pointing to a website with problematic content? Bulk.
In the past IPs that were whitelisted or had very good reputations could improve delivery of email with neutral or even borderline poor reputations. It seems that is no longer an effect senders can rely on. It may even be that Yahoo, and other ISPs, are going to start splitting IP reputation from content reputation. IP reputation is critical for getting mail in the door, and without a good IP reputation you’ll see slow delivery. But once the mail has been accepted, there’s a whole other level of filtering, most of it on the content and generally unaffected by the IP reputation.
I don’t think the changes are going to go away any time soon. I think they may be refined, but I do think that reputation on email content (particularly domains and URLs and target IP addresses) is going to play a bigger and bigger role in email delivery.
What, specifically, is going to happen at Yahoo? Only they can tell you and I’m not sure I have enough of a feel for the pattern to speculate about the future. I do think that it’s going to take a few weeks for things to settle down and be consistent enough that we can start to poke the black box and map how it works.

Canada passes anti-spam bill

Call it C-28, call it FISA, call it COPL, just don’t call it a pipe dream any longer.
Today the Canadian anti spam law received royal assent and is now law. ReturnPath is saying it will take effect September 2011, but that’s the only date I’ve seen published. The full text of the bill as passed by the House of Commons can be found at http://www2.parl.gc.ca/content/hoc/Bills/403/Government/C-28/C-28_3/C-28_3.PDF
It’s fairly dense and I’m still reading through the final version. Of critical importance for anyone marketing in Canada is that it sets requirements that commercial email be sent with the permission of the recipient. This is different from CAN SPAM here in the US which doesn’t require consent of the recipient, but allows anyone to send unsolicited email as long as it meets the standards set by the law.
CBC Story

Return Path blog post
CAUCE posts
Thin Data implementation guide

Holomaxx dismisses part of lawsuit

Ken announced yesterday that Holomaxx dropped their suits against Ironport and ReturnPath. Suits against Yahoo and Hotmail are still active.
In the Yahoo case, there is a case management meeting on January 14th.
In the Microsoft case, a response the complaint is due by December 17th.
I’m not quite sure what happened to prompt this change, but I think it makes it even more unlikely that the case will be successful. The courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of ISPs in these kinds of cases.
EDIT: I’d link to Ken’s article, but I appear to have closed that tab and I can’t find it on his website. I’ll add it as soon as I do.
EDIT: Ken’s announcement

Now you know…

The key to email marketing, at least if you read blogs and talk to experts who blog about such things, is to segment your lists. But what does segmenting your lists really mean? Ken touches on it in a recent article about engagement and segmenting.
Segmenting your list means, quite simply, knowing your audience. It means tailoring your message to them, in order to extract as much money from them as possible. It means knowing which subscribers you can push with volume and which you will lose if you increase things too far.
In short, it means not treating all your subscribers the same, instead treating them slightly differently based on how they interact with your message.
To some people, this is too difficult. Ken even quoted someone in the industry as saying

TWSD: lie about the source of address

A few months ago I got email from Staff of Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont, to an addresses scraped off one of my websites. At the bottom it says:

Office cat says

All work and no cat petting makes for a very cranky, and in the way, cat.

GFI/SORBS – should I use them?

Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
In the past week we’ve demonstrated that the SORBS reputation data is riddled with mistakes, poor practices, security holes and operational problems, and that the quality of the end result is really too poor to be useful.
Today I’m looking at how this information should affect your choice of spam filtering technology.

GFI/SORBS – I'm blacklisted, now what?

Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
In the past week we’ve demonstrated that the SORBS reputation data is riddled with mistakes, poor practices, security holes and operational problems, and that the quality of the end result is really too poor to be useful.
What does this mean to you though? There are really two aspects: 1. what to do if you’re blacklisted or blocked by GFI or based on GFI/SORBS data and 2. how this information should affect your choice of spam filtering technology. We’ll be looking at the first point today, and the second tomorrow.

GFI/SORBS considered harmful, part 3

Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
In the last few days we’ve talked about GFI’s lack of responsiveness, the poor quality of their reputation and blacklist data, and the interesting details of their DDoS claims. Today we’re going to look at (some of) the fundamental problems with GFI’s procedures and infrastructure that cause those issues. Some of the subset of issues I’ve chosen highlight are minor, some are major, but they show a pattern of poor decisions.
SSL Certificates
When you use SSL on a web connection it brings you two benefits. The first is that it encrypts the connection between your browser and the webserver, so that it’s very difficult for anyone to watch or tamper with your interaction with that webserver. The second, more important, reason is to make sure that you’re talking to the webserver you think you’re talking to, to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks.
This security relies on you trusting the certification authority that issues the SSL certificate that the website uses. A website providing services to the public should always use an SSL certificate created by one of a small number of reputable certification authorities that are pre-loaded into all webservers as “trusted”. These SSL certificates are something that need to be be purchased, but they’re very inexpensive – less than ten dollars a year.

GFI/SORBS – a DDoS Intermezzo

Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
I’ve been stage-managing for a production of The Nutcracker this week, so musical terminology is on my mind. In opera, the intermezzo is a comedic interlude between acts of an opera series.
This comedic interlude is about the “DDoS” – a distributed denial of service attack. What is a denial of service attack?