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Gmail rendering problem workaround

Gmail recently changed some of the rendering of emails on their website, breaking a lot of email layouts in the process.
Numerous places have published workarounds including
The Email Guide and Return Path.

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About that spam suit

John Levine has a longer blog post about the Smith vs. Comcast suit. Be sure to read the comment from Terry Zink about the MS related claims.

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The secret to fixing delivery problems

There is a persistent belief among some senders that the technical part of sending email is the most important part of delivery. They think that by tweaking things around the edges, like changing their rate limiting and refining bounce handling, their email will magically end up in the inbox.
This is a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for bulk foldering and blocking by the ISPs. Yes, technical behaviour does count and senders will find it harder to deliver mail if they are doing something grossly wrong. In my experience, though, most technical issues are not sufficient to cause major delivery problems.
On the other hand, senders can do everything technically perfect, from rate limiting to bounce handling to handling feedback loops through authentication and offer wording and still have delivery problems. Why? Sending unwanted mail trumps technical perfection. If no one wants the email mail then there will be delivery problems.
Now, I’ve certainly dealt with clients who had some minor engagement issues and the bulk of their delivery problems were technical in nature. Fix the technical problems and make some adjustments to the email and mail gets to the inbox. But with senders who are sending unwanted email the only way to fix delivery problems is to figure out what recipients want and then send mail meeting those needs.
Persistent delivery problems cannot be fixed by tweaking technical settings.

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ISPs may face blocking challenges

Eric Goldman wrote an article about a Comcast subscriber suing a number of companies (including Comcast and Microsoft and TRUSTe) for blocking mail. As part of the judge’s decision he rules that the ISPs that blocked the plaintiff’s email are not protected under 47 USC 230(c)(2).

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Reputation and "the cloud"

As Reddit recently learned it’s not a great idea to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host mailservers. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them related to the reputation of mail coming from EC2 servers.
When you’re using machines in the cloud, changing IP addresses is as simple as initializing a new server. Spammers discovered this almost as soon as the EC2 cloud became public. They would set up a mailserver and send spam through that server until it was blocked. Then they’d just start another instance to avoid the block and keep spamming. They had an almost unlimited number of IP addresses to abuse and moving around was easy to do. Amazon did little to stop the spam coming from the cloud so many ISPs and spam filtering companies blocked email from the entire range of IP addresses allocated to the EC2 cloud.
Blocking large swathes of network space that are consistent sources of abuse is well accepted as a method of dealing with spam. Yes, this form of blocking has inconvenienced legitimate companies who aren’t actually doing anything wrong. But when a service provider doesn’t take sufficient action to stop customers from spamming through their networks, then ISPs will implement countermeasures.

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Reddit and email

Ben over at Mailchimp writes about Reddit discovering a lot of their mail was being blocked because they were sending from the Amazon EC2 cloud.

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Reputation

It used to be that every potential client that called me up to ask me to help them with their delivery issues would tell me they weren’t a spammer. Over the last year or so that’s changed to telling me that they have a good reputation and don’t understand why they’re having delivery problems.
This leads me to believe that there is some confusion about what reputation is and what reputation is not.
Reputation is a shorthand term for a complex formula measuring the history of email from an IP address. Some reputation schemes measure the history of email containing a particular URL or domain.
Recipient domains measure a lot of things and use them at various points during the email transaction. Some measurements are integrated into a single value that is queried during the SMTP transaction. If the measurement is too bad, the email is rejected or rate limited. Other measurements are queried after the email is accepted by the ISP, and those values determine if an email is delivered to the inbox or the bulk folder.
There are a couple important things to remember about reputation.

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Vacation

After 9 years of running Word to the Wise, we’re taking a vacation. A really-o, truly-o vacation that doesn’t involve stealing a couple days before a conference or business meeting or visiting family. Also no internet and no email. I’m not even taking my laptop (I am taking my iPad, but it’s an awesome game machine).
I’ll be back to posting when I get back into the office mid-May.
Aloha!

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Recent email marketing news

Apparently mentioning “affiliate” in a blog post brings out the blog spammers. I’ve had dozens of trackbacks on yesterday’s how to avoid affiliate spam. Oh, the irony.
A bucket of announcements came out over the last week.
The uber smart folks at Mailchimp have a new iPad app called Chimpadeedoo. This app lets merchants collect email addresses at the point of sale, on an iPad sitting next to the register. Given the troubles my clients have run into when trying to collect addresses in their brick and mortars, this is definitely a product whose time has come.
Venkat talks about a few anti-spam cases making their way through California courts and how the courts seem to be siding with the plaintiffs recently.
On the lawsuit front, John Levine posts about peacefire.org losing an anti-spam case due to the Gordon v. Virtumundo case.
ReturnPath and Liveclicker have partnered to bring video to email. I know marketers are all for video in email, but I can’t get excited about it. I read fast and videos always seem to take to long to watch. I don’t have a feel, though, for how much the average email recipient wants video in their mailbox.
Stephanie Miller from ReturnPath has a summary of a talk given by representatives from Hotmail and Yahoo at the Email Insider’s Summit sponsored by Mediapost. Both ISPs emphasized the need for senders to engage their recipients.

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Avoiding spammers in affiliate programs

How can companies avoid paying spammers and having their brand associated with spammers?
One of the easiest ways to avoid spam is to not pay for acquisition email. Simply don’t set up an affiliate email marketing program. There are a lot of folks who don’t like me saying that, and who have argued vociferously with me over the years. But email is not a good medium for acquiring new customers if you don’t intend to spam. Email is a great medium for talking with current customers who are engaged with a brand and a company, but currently it is a poor way to acquire customers without spamming.
There are ways companies have successfully used email to acquire customers. There are actually newsletters that contain content but also sell advertising in the newsletter. Look at the newsletters you are receiving, that are relevant to your business space. One example of a newsletter that did this successfully is Magilla Marketing published by DirectMag. Every week there were 4 new articles from Ken Magill, supported by advertising in the newsletter and on the website. These kind of ads will let you reach your target market without spamming.
Now, I know that there are a lot of marketing departments out there that are going to insist that there aren’t useful newsletters or advertising venues for their field and the only way they can acquire customers is to use affiliate programs. I’ve had clients tell me the exact same things. Often they came to me as clients because their own email marketing was blocked by a blocklist or a spam filtering company due to their hiring of spammers. They wanted to police and clean up their affiliate program without having to give it up.
Policing affiliate programs can be done, if the company invests the time and energy into screening the program.
For every company that wants to send email advertising your company ask them to provide information about their company and their email program.

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