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Goodmail for sale?

The first edition of the Magill Report dropped in my mailbox (and the mailboxes of lots of other people judged by my twitter feed) this afternoon. In his newsletter, tucked between an announcement of a new DMA CEO and rather depressing news about how long it’s taking to find jobs, he announced that Goodmail is being offered for sale. It seems that an investment banking firm is offering a company it calls “Project Conduit.”

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Social Networks and Email

There’s been a steady trickle of “Email is Dead!” announcements over the years.
2005 – Pew Internet announces “email may be at the beginning of a slow decline”
2006 – USA Today announces “Email has become the new snail-mail”
2009 – The Wall Street Journal announces “The End of the Email Era”.
That’s not surprising, and it’s due to the importance of email – in the same way that most high-end smartphones have to be pitched as “iPhone killers”, no new communication channel will get any respect unless it’s pitched to the blogosphere (and the venture capitalists) as an “email killer”.
That claim has been debunked lots of times. Repeatedly. Many, many times. More times than that.
But sometimes you need something to make you notice quite how alive email is. I signed up for a Facebook account about three years ago, and had half forgotten about it. After a couple of people mentioned it at a pool party on Saturday, I added three friends yesterday.
This is what my mailbox looks like today (with a couple of private mailing lists blanked out):

Email is looking quite healthy.
If anything does ever kill it, I’m betting it won’t be social networking.

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Spamhaus and Gmail

Today’s been chock full of phone calls and dealing with clients, but I did happen to notice a bunch of people having small herds of cows because Spamhaus listed www.gmail.com on the SBL.
“SPAMHAUS BLOCKS GOOGLE!!!” the headlines scream.
My own opinion is that Google doesn’t do enough to police their network and their users, and that a SBL listing isn’t exactly a false positive or Spamhaus overreaching. In this case, though, the headlines and the original article didn’t actually get the story right.
Spamhaus blocked a range of IP addresses that are owned by Google that included the IP for www.gmail.com. This range of IP addresses did not include the gmail outgoing mailservers.
Spamhaus says

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Is your data secure?

Not just secure from outside forces, but also secure from employees?
In a recent survey published by Help Net Security, approximately half of all employees said they would take data, including customer data, when leaving a job.
This has major implications for ESPs, where employees have access to customer data and mailing lists. There are at least 2 cases that I am aware of where employees have walked out of a company with customer mailing lists, and I’m sure there are other incidents.
ESPs should take action to prevent employees from stealing customer data.

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The return of the Magill Report

After a 6 month hiatus, Ken Magill has returned to offer his insightful, and somewhat snarky, take on email marketing. You can subscribe at The Magill Report.
Ken is really trying to make this report an example of how to do ad supported email newsletters right. When I subscribed yesterday I received the following welcome message:

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How not to build a mailing list

I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

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Email and politics

I occasionally consult for activists using email. Their needs and requirements are a little different from email marketers. Sure, the requirements for email delivery are the same: relevant and engaging mail to people who requested it. But there are complicating issues that most marketers don’t necessarily have to deal with.
Activist groups are attractive targets for forged signups. Think about it, when people get deeply involved in arguments on the internet, they often look for ways to harass the person on the other end of the disagreement. They will often signup the people they’re disagreeing with for mailing lists. When the disagreements are political, the logical target is a group on the other side of the political divide.
People also sign up spamtraps and bad addresses as a way to cause problems or harass the political group itself. Often this results in the activist group getting blocked. This never ends well, as instead of fixing the problem, the group goes yelling about how their voice is being silenced and their politics are being censored!!
No, they’re not being silenced, they’re running an open mailing list and a lot of people are on it who never asked to be on it. They’re complaining and the mail is getting blocked.
With that as background, I noticed one of the major political blogs announced their brand new mailing list today. Based on their announcement it seemed they that they may have talked to someone who knew about managing a mailing list.

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Should you respond to complaints

David Spinks asks on twitter:

Should you ever contact someone who made an abuse complaint about your newsletter to find out why

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Thursday mini-audit – part 3

Four weeks ago you signed up for your mailing list using a virgin email address. (You didn’t? Maybe you should do that today – there’s no time like Thursday for a quick sanity check!)
Check the mailbox for the account you signed up

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SPF records: not really all that important

I’ve been working through some Hotmail issues with a client over the last few months. One of the things that has become clear to me is how little Hotmail actually does with SPF records. In fact, Hotmail completely ignored my client’s SPF record and continued to deliver email into the inbox.
This isn’t just a sender that had a “well, we think most of our email will come from these IPs but aren’t telling you to throw away email that doesn’t” record. In fact, this client specifically said “if email doesn’t come from this /28 range of email addresses, then it is unauthorized and should be thrown away.” The email was being sent from an IP outside of the range listed in the SPF record.
As part of the process involved in fixing the delivery problems, I had the client update their SPF record and then I enrolled their domain in the SenderID program at Hotmail. This didn’t have any effect, though. Hotmail is still not checking SPF for this client. When I asked Hotmail what was going on they said, “We do not do lookups on every sender’s mail.”
So, there you have it folks. The last bastion of SPF/SenderID has abandoned the technology. Even a totally invalid SPF record doesn’t matter, mail can still reach the inbox at Hotmail.

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