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Spam is not a marketing strategy

Unfortunately, this fact doesn’t stop anyone from spamming as part of their marketing outreach. And it’s not just email spam. I get quite a bit of blog spam, most of which is caught by Akismet. Occasionally, though, there’s spam which isn’t caught by the filter and ends up coming to me for approval.
Many of these are explanations of why email marketing is so awesome. Some of them are out and out laugh inducing. One of my favorites, and the inspiration for this post.

Email as social media

Rachel Luxemburg, a good friend of mine who runs the Community team over at Adobe, tweeted a link to Successful Social Media is More Than A Campaign. I was reading that article and realized quite how much of it applies to email. In fact, a couple of Amber’s specific recommendations are directly relevant to email.

Just stop spamming!

Al posted a clip from the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar on SpamResource (slightly NSFW) that resonated with me this week.
If you meet me on the street and ask me what my job is I’ll tell you that I work with companies who send bulk email to make sure that they’re not sending spam. I do this by educating clients into good practices and teaching them how to send mail people want to receive. What this statement doesn’t tell people is that usually clients find me because they have been suspended by their ISP for spamming or blocked by some receiver.
Clients who find me because they can’t send mail usually hire me to solve their immediate problem. And I do give the the best advice I can to resolve their problem. But fixing today’s problem isn’t enough, you also need to fix the processes that caused the problem. To me, a critical part of my job is to set clients up for long term success by creating procedures that will get them delisted and keep them from being relisted in the future.
Sometimes, though, I have those moments Al is talking about. When clients don’t actually want to fix their problems, they just want to argue. They want to argue about the definition of spam. They want to argue about permission. They want to argue about how awful their ISPs are for suspending their account. They want to argue about CAN SPAM. They want to argue about free speech. They are angry and they want to fight.
My role is to listen to them, then guide them down a constructive path. I do turn out to be the sounding board for a lot of customers, sometimes they just need to know someone is listening to them. Once they get it all out we can move on into solving the problem.
But, boy, are there the occasional conversations where I just want to scream, “JUST STOP SPAMMING!”

Mail that looks like spam

One thing I repeat over and over again is to not send mail that looks like spam. Over at the Mailchimp Blog they report some hard data on what looks like spam. The design is simple, they took examples of mail sent by their customers and forwarded them over to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project to be reviewed by humans.
In a number of cases they discovered that certain kinds of templates kept getting flagged as spam, even when Mailchimp was sure that the sender had permission and the recipients wanted the mail. They analyzed some of these false positives and identified some of the reasons that naive users may identify those particular emails as spam.
Ben concludes:

One beeelion dollars

Facebook won another round in their court case against a Canadian spammer last week. Their $873,000,000 judgment was upheld by the Quebec Superior court. At today’s exchange rates, the judgment translates to over CDN$1,000,000,000.
In fine spammer style the defendant, Adam Guerbuez, is flouting the judgment and claiming he won’t pay a dime. In fact, he’s already filed bankruptcy and is reported to have transferred a number of assets to family members. From what I’m hearing from some of my Canadian colleagues the courts up there take a very dim view of his behaviour. Like many things that go through the court system, though, it is unlikely that the process will be rapid.
This is one of the largest, if not the largest, fines levied for violations of the CAN SPAM act. I don’t think Facebook will see much, if anything, of the money. But, hey, maybe the Canadian courts will throw this spammer in jail for flouting their ruling.

The hard sell works

Ken Magill, dad extraordinaire, describes how he went above and beyond the call to get his son a DVD while battling hard sell marketing techniques.

Clicktracking link abuse

If you use redirection links in the emails you send out, where a click on the link goes to your server – so you can record that someone clicked – before redirecting to the real destination, then you’ve probably already thought about how they can be abused.
Redirection links are simple in concept – you include a link that points to your webserver in email that you send out, then when recipients click on it they end up at your webserver. Instead of displaying a page, though, your webserver sends what’s called a “302 redirect” to send the recipients web browser on to the real destination. How does your webserver know where to redirect to? There are several different ways, with different tradeoffs:

Return Path Certification: Is there value?

Recently, a client asked me, what is the value to ISPs in utilizing Return Path Certification (formerly known as Sender Score Certified)? Meaning, why do ISPs use it? A number of ISPs both big and small have spam filtering systems that treat certified IP addresses differently than non-certified IP addresses. Sometimes spam filtering is bypassed, effectively guaranteeing inbox delivery. Sometimes rate limits are greatly loosened, allowing mail to flow in much faster. Sometimes it is used as just one of the many variables used by the ISP to determine inbox placement versus bulk folder placement versus rejecting the mail outright.
The question is a little different than usual. It’s not a question of, why should a sender become certified? It’s a question of, why would an ISP choose to use the certification data on the inbound side? It’s a neat question, one that I’ve never really heard answered by an ISP before.
Curious, I asked a number of ISP folks for their opinions on this topic. Assuming few would want to discuss this on the record, I made it clear that I wouldn’t mention any names. What I found was that nobody had anything bad to say about Return Path Certification. One person I talked to said that they don’t really give it that much thought–it just works. Many thousands of inbound messages come in from certified IPs, and they never get any spam complaints about those messages, so it’s all good. That’s hardly a scientific review process, but hey, if it works for them…
Another told me that Return Path Certification “helps us by helping senders improve the overall quality and desirability of email that comes into our network. This is great for our customers who rely on email communications in their daily life and expect of us predictable delivery of their key emails.”
The overwhelming message I received from ISPs was that they like Return Path Certification because there’s a strong implication that those mail streams are already clean and that the sender’s practices have already been vetted. They feel that Return Path is doing the hard work of insisting on the right best practice requirements and monitoring appropriate metrics to ensure that good guys get certified and bad guys don’t get certified. If a sender can get certified, it is as though they are announcing to the world (and ISPs) that they have already been reviewed and seem to be doing things correctly.
10/14/2010 Update: Return Path just notified certified senders that their mail will now proceed directly to the inbox at Comcast, presumably bypassing some or all of Comcast’s usual spam filtering.
Guest post by Al Iverson.

Ask; Don't Assume.

Asking for permission is an obvious best practice in email marketing. But, it applies to billing and fees as well, if you ask the FTC. Click here to read about their settlement with Jason Strober of payday loan marketer Swish Marketing.

Zeus Loves to Spoof

I manage inbound mail for a large set of mailboxes at work; and a number of those mailboxes are on various Zeus botnet spam lists. So, every day, I’m treated to the Zeus botnet “flavor of the day,” giving me insight into who they’re spoofing at any given time. A client asked me why the messages morph so often and I explained that the spammers seem to be continually changing their spam in an attempt evade signature-based identification and blocking. And wow, they sure do morph a lot.
In just the past three weeks, I’ve seen Zeus botnet spew try to pretend to be mail from all of these different companies: Amazon, Bank of America, Bell Canada, Best Buy, Craigslist, Credential Solutions, Esurance, Facebook, Fedex, Groupon, iTunes, LinkedIn, Microsoft, NewEgg, Vistaprint and Zappos. That’s just in three weeks! And I’m not even sure I successfully identified all of the spoofed senders.
This is pretty scary stuff. Uneducated consumers might be fooled into thinking that these are legitimate emails. The companies sending legitimate emails now have to wonder, what can they do to prevent/mitigate these kinds of issues? A smart company probably uses email authentication to help identify their mail as legitimate, but the malicious messages don’t even use their domains. ISPs want to block it, but they’re not always easily identified. It seems to me that impeding delivery of this kind of bad mail requires a whole bunch of moving parts, involving multiple stakeholders in the email ecosystem.
For starters…