Recent Posts

SMS Providers: Filtering Content?

In the realm of email, content filtering is old hat. Nowadays, it’s all about reputation and engagement. Okay, sure, content filtering still exists, but the bad old days are long gone. No more do you have to worry that using the word FREE in the subject line is going to get your mail blocked.
Sounds like spam blocking in the world of text messaging is not quite as modern, according to a lawsuit I read about a couple of weeks ago. SMS messaging provider EZ Texting filed suit against cell carrier T-Mobile over blocking of its client’s mobile messages, claiming that the reason for the blocking was apparently due either to content-based filtering or because of censorship. The EZ Texting client at the heart of the matter is a website that allows users to locate their nearest medical marijuana dispensary.
T-Mobile, in its response to the allegations, states that what actually happened is that EZ Texting broke the rules. When you register a short code with the various cellular carriers, you provide them with written documentation detailing just exactly what you intend to do with that short code. What kind of messages you’re going to send to your subscriber base. What the message flow looks like in various interaction scenarios. From my experience working for an ESP that offers mobile messaging support, I know this to be true.
As T-Mobile said on its website: “Each carrier has a process to ensure that content providers like EZ Texting follow the Mobile Marketing Association‘s U.S. Consumer Best Practices Guidelines for Cross-Carrier Mobile Content Programs, as well as other regulations applicable to the mobile content business. When T-Mobile discovered that EZ Texting had not followed this process for […] the text messaging service at issue in the lawsuit – we turned off the short code that EZ Texting was using for these services. The content of the […] service simply had nothing to do with T-Mobile’s decision.”
T-Mobile said that the documentation filed with the provider indicated that the short code in question suggested that its intended use was to let subscribers know about promotions at various bars and night clubs. Use of the short code for a campaign related to a medical marijuana dispensary service fell outside of that use case, and lo, T-Mobile revoked use of that short code. They say that they “subsequently learned that EZTexting was running several other unauthorized shadow programs on the same short code,” meaning that there was additional use of the short code even beyond the original, defined use (night club promotions) and the use by the medical marijuana dispensary locater.
Turns out, the point is moot. Last Friday, October 1st, the Washington Post reported that T-Mobile and EZ Texting have settled their lawsuit. I’m kind of saddened by that, as it would have been nice to see the courts affirm T-Mobile’s right to block inappropriate use of their network. But, you never know which way the court will rule, so maybe it was in everybody’s best interest to not let this get as far as a jury.
And who knows, maybe EZ Texting jumped the gun here, and only needed to file amended paperwork to fix the issue. Compare this to spam blocking — we’ve all had clients who immediately want to threaten and bluster and potentially even sue, because they got spam blocked. But, 99.99% of the time, it’s much easier, and much simpler, to resolve the issue, to get the block removed, without resorting to legal action.

Challenge Response: It is what it is

Have you ever sent an email message, and received an automated response in reply? And in that reply, you are asked to “prove that you are human” by clicking on a link and/or entering a CAPTCHA code. What is this? Is it new?
When that happens, you’re interacting with a “challenge response” email filtering system. When you receive a “prove that you’re human” reply, that message is a “challenge” that the spam filter is requesting that you to respond to. This “response” to the “challenge” helps the spam filter (in theory) know that a real person sent the original message.
It’s not that widely used, nor is it that widely loved, because it has a pretty big flaw. Very little spam has legitimate from address on it. Most of the time, the from address is forged. It goes back to some innocent, unrelated party. In those cases (i.e. “for most spam,”) the challenge email is sent to the wrong person. So, you end up spamming unrelated people with “challenges.” Ever received a challenge request in reply to an email you never sent? Yup, that’s what’s happening. It’s just as bad as the spam itself, in my opinion. It’s an annoying email, probably sent in bulk, to people who didn’t ask for it.
Occasionally marketers freak out, thinking, “OH MY GOSH! MY MESSAGES AREN’T GETTING THROUGH!! THEY’RE GETTING TRAPPED BY THESE FILTERS!!!” That reaction is overkill. Don’t freak out! This kind of filter is not widely used — and it is not new at all. Heck, just about four years ago, I helped to answer a challenge/response question for Email Insider’s Email Diva column.
I guess this is one of those things that comes up again periodically, because there are always new people in our industry who haven’t stumbled across it before.
An industry colleague of mine, who works for a major ISP, was asked what he makes of those filters. “It is what it is,” he replied. Meaning, perhaps, that these filters are not great, but there’s not much you can do about them, and they are really not worth losing all that much sleep over.

Email append: Do you hate it?

Hi! Al Iverson here. I offered to guest blog for my friend Laura Atkins, as she’s off to a conference for a few days. If you like my posts, c’mon over and visit me at my blog, Spam Resource.
A few weeks ago, an industry colleague asked me why I’m so anti-email append. I’m not specifically anti-email append, I’m just not very fond of things that cause deliverability problems. And any time I have some huge, horribly complex client deliverability problem to deal with, the underlying source of the problem tends to be some sort of third party data thing, like email append or co-registration. It’s pretty straight forward, from my perspective. You’re sending mail to people who didn’t give you their email address. I know it’s legal, the ISPs know it’s legal. But the ISPs see that this causes spam complaints to spike, and they hate enabling delivery of mail that causes complaints, so it gets you blocked.
Email Append -> Add those addresses to your list -> You get higher spam complaints -> You get blocked.
Why does this happen? Why are these people complaining about my mail? This is a simple question to answer, too: Subscribers don’t want this mail. Most of the people who get this mail, they were not expecting it. They didn’t give you their email address. They’re surprised that you have their email address. They’re probably already getting a lot of unexpected mail (you don’t think you’re the only one who “appended” their email address, do you?), and they are experiencing inbox fatigue. Click, select all, report spam.
You have no idea what our subscribers want, you might say. Really? No idea at all? If you do this, and you find yourself blocked, as you likely will, THAT RIGHT THERE IS AN EXCELLENT DATA POINT THAT SHOWS THAT PEOPLE DON’T WANT THIS MAIL. You’re making assumptions about what you think your subscribers want, and the data is telling you that you’re wrong. Listen to that data, learn from it.
If you don’t, you’re not going to have much success getting mail delivered successfully to the inbox.

Suing spammers

I’m off to MAAWG next week and seem to have had barely enough time to breathe lately, much less blog. I have a half written post, but it’s taking a little more research to put together. That can wait until I get the chance to do the research.
Instead I thought I’d talk about the North Coast Journal article “The Rise and Fall of a Spam Crusader.” It’s quite an interesting article and looks into the personal and business sacrifices that people make in order to chase down spammers.
In my experience a lot of the serial litigators have very poor practices around data collection and analysis. They don’t collect evidence, they just collect email and then make assertions and assumptions. This not every effective when having to convince a judge that you are right.
The article actually does nothing to change this impression. The cases ASIS won are the cases where the defendants didn’t respond. That also means that ASIS couldn’t collect.
I do disagree with Mr. Singleton, the lawyer, where he says CAN SPAM is dead. In many cases I’ve seen there aren’t clear CAN SPAM violations. So if he’s trying to sue these spammers under CAN SPAM his cause of action is wrong. Secondly, the article goes on to talk about the broader implications.

Blasting the message!

Sending frequency is an important part of any email campaign. Too little mail and recipients forget about the mail and don’t open it when it does arrive. Too much mail and folks start complaining, like John Cole over at Balloon Juice.

Know your target audience…

… and the device they’re probably going to read your email on.
@lauter from MailChimp points and laughs at an advertising email from Blackberry-the-company that’s completely unreadable when read on Blackberry-the-device.

That’s really bad marketing on a bunch of different levels.

Beware the TINS Army

When consulting with clients, I spend a lot of time trying to help them better understand the concept of sender reputation. Spam reports, feedback loops, and other data that comes from a collection of positive and negative reputational feedback about a company sending email.
Certainly, the “This is not spam” action – moving an email from the spam folder to the inbox, or clicking the “not spam” button in a web mail’s interface, is a strong positive reputational action. Some webmail providers use this data to decide which bulked senders deserve being let out of the penalty box – which should have their mail once again delivered to the inbox.
A client recently theorized that a great solution to their delivery problems would be to do this “en masse.” Sign up for hundreds or thousands of webmail accounts, send my mail to them, and click on the “not spam” button for each of my own emails. That’ll greatly improve my sending reputation, right?
NO! ISPs have already thought of this. They watch for this. They’re really good at picking up on things like this. I know for a fact that Yahoo and Hotmail and AOL notice stuff like this, and I strongly suspect other webmail providers notice it as well.
What happens when Yahoo or Hotmail pick up on this type of unwanted activity? Well, if it’s at Yahoo, they’re likely to block all mail from you, 100%, forever. I’ve seen it happen more than once. Yahoo might even identify all of your netblocks, ones beyond the ones sending today’s mail or originating today’s activity. And good luck trying to convince them that you’re not a spammer – you have a better chance of winning the lottery two weeks in a row.
As for Hotmail – what would Hotmail do? Ask Boris Mizhen. Microsoft is currently suing him, alleging that he and/or his agents or associates engaged in this very practice.

Spam isn't a best practice

I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices.
Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have customers sending spam. In either case, I’ve been thinking a lot about best practices and what we all mean when we talk about best practices. In conversing with various people it’s clear that the term doesn’t mean what the speakers think it means.
For me, best practice means sending mail in a way that create happy and engaged recipients. There are a lot of details wrapped up in there, but all implementation choices stem from the answer to the question “what will make our customers happy.” But a lot of marketers, email and otherwise, don’t focus on what makes their recipients or targets happy.
In fact, for many people I talk to when they say “best practice” what they really mean is “send as much mail as recipients will tolerate.” This isn’t that surprising, the advertising and marketing industries survive by pushing things as far as the target will tolerate (emphasis added).

Does your signup pass muster?

On Eric Goldman’s blog, Venkat discusses a recent fifth circuit decision about an online signup process and what the court will look at when considering a claim that a user didn’t read an online disclaimer.

Zombie Apocalypse

I hope my series on zombie addresses has convinced you that there are zombie addresses on your list and that you should be concerned about the effect they have on delivery and metrics. Today I’d like to talk about what you can do to get rid of zombie addresses without affecting too many actual subscribers.

One thing that many companies struggle with while dealing with zombie addresses is letting go of addresses. They are so tied up in the idea that a bigger list is better that they can’t let them go. Even if a particular address has not had any activity in 18 or 24 months, they insist that they can’t give it up, it might come back and the customer might make a giant purchase. No. It’s a zombie. It’s not coming back, except to eat your brains.
The first step to dealing with zombies is to acknowledge their existence. They are there, they are on your lists and they are dirtying up your lists. Pretending they’re not there does not make them go away. They are zombies. In no case is there a human inside. There is no potential sale lurking, waiting to jump out and act on that perfectly crafted offer.
The second thing to remember is that the humans that used to have the zombie addresses found you once and they are still interested in what you’re offering then they will find you again. They may even already be back on your list with their new email address.
While you can’t identify zombie addresses specifically, you can identify addresses that act like zombie addresses. These are addresses that have no activity over a long period of time, more than 12 months. For these addresses that haven’t had activity in 12 – 18 – 24 months, you want to confirm with the recipient that they are there and want to continue to receive mail from you.
The best way to notify them is to send an email asking if they want to remain on your list. If they fail to act, you will remove them from future mailings. Short, sweet and will let you drop off zombie addresses without much effort on your part.
I know, I know, you aren’t ready to let go so fast. After all, some people have come back after 24 months and made a purchase from the perfect offer. They’re not dead yet! OK. But you can’t get a response from them through email. They just don’t care enough about what you’re sending. That’s when you contact them through another channel.
For instance, if the email address is tied to a web account, say a social networking site or bank account or a web forum, you can also contact the user through your website. Next time they log in, send them a message that says their email address has been removed due to inactivity, but if they want to reactivate they can do so at the subscriber preference center or profile page. When they do, send them an email to confirm that this is the address where they want to receive mail. At this point you can give them a link or a magic cookie to past into the website to verify the address.
Or if you’re a bigger retailer you can send alerts to your customer service staff, so when the account holder contacts you by phone with a question or an order you can get an updated email address. If you have a loyalty program, have an alert come up at the point of sale and the clerk can ask for an updated email address.
I even know one company that would send postcards to their zombie accounts in an effort to re-engage them and get an active email address from them.
If the person never comes back, if they don’t ever interact with your business again, if none of the channels work to contact them and update the address then it really is best to just let the relationship go. It may not be you, or anything you’ve done. People move on, their interests change and that’s part of life. They may have moved outside of your service area, or they may have joined your list for a specific product that they don’t need or you don’t sell. They may have died and turned into a real zombie. In any case, they are not a viable prospect for your mail.
Email addresses and business relationships are not forever. Letting zombie addresses go is important for the health of any email marketing program.