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AOL layoffs and postmaster changes

As most of you probably know, AOL went through a serious round of layoffs yesterday. Unlike previous layoffs this one did hit the postmaster team pretty hard. Anna posted this morning that she was the only non-programming member of the postmaster team left in the US. This means there are a number of experienced folks looking for work with experience managing delivery for a large outfit. More info is on her blog.
While I don’t have any firm data, I expect that this is going to significantly affect the support that senders see from AOL. I know many of us have held up AOL as the poster child for how ISPs should interact with senders. That era is drawing to a close.
These layoffs come as AOL has migrated to a new mail system and a lot of senders are seeing new and different error messages. I do believe the folks handling the mail system and the migration are still there and are feverishly working to resolve problems caused by the migration. Right now things are in flux and senders should probably expect delays in getting support from AOL for delivery problems.
UPDATE: Matt Vernhout has a list of suggestions for how to deal with AOL delivery issues.

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Click-wrap licenses again

Earlier this week ARS Technica reported on a ruling from the Missouri Court of Appeals stating that terms and conditions are enforceable even if the users are not forced to visit the T&C pages. Judge Rahmeyer, one of the panel members, did point out that the term in question, under what state laws the agreement would be enforced, was not an unreasonable request. She “do[es] not want [their] opinion to indicate that consumers assent to any buried term that a website may provide simply by using the website or clicking ‘I agree.'”
What does this have to do with email? Well, it means that reasonable terms in the agreements may still be binding even if the user does not read the full terms of the opt in before submitting an email address. In practical terms, though, there’s very little that has changed. Hiding grants of permission deep in a terms document has long been a sneaky trick practiced by spammers and list sellers. Legitimate companies already make terms clear so that users know what type of and how much mail to expect by signing up to a list. They also know that the legal technicalities of permission are not as important as meeting the recipients expectations.

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Keep subscribers happy

Mark Brownlow writes about engagement. “…the people we really need to keep happy are the subscribers.” Go read the whole thing.

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FBI indicts 19 for internet related fraud

A federal grand jury in Dallas returned an indictment this week charging 19 individuals with conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. 15 of the defendants are charged with email fraud. All in all, these defendants are accused of defrauding various companies, from telcos to web developers, of $15,000,000.

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Important notification spammers break the law

I’m currently being inundated at multiple address with spam advertising spamming services. Most of these notices have the subject line: IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION. The text includes:

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Resource hogging

Today on SFGate there was an article talking about how some Bay Area coffee houses were struggling to deal with workers who purchase one cup of coffee and then camp out all day using the free wifi. The final paragraph quoted one of the campers.

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Lessons from the good, the typical and the ugly

What can smart ESPs learn from my recent series The good, The typical and The ugly?

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Delivery case study

Mailchimp published a case study looking at a customer moving from sending in house to using Mailchimp.

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And the ugly…

Getting back to my series on the good, the typical and the ugly in the ESP field, and there is some very ugly out there. I have 3 examples of the ugliness out there and what ESPs and legitimate senders are competing with.
The fake ESP
A spammer approached me early on in my consulting career, asking me to help him set up a fake ESP. He wanted to set up his corporate network so that to an outsider it would look like he was selling ESP services and thus had a large number of customers. There wouldn’t be any customers, however, all the mail would be coming from his company. When the blocking got bad enough, and it would as he would purchase addresses from anywhere, he would “disconnect” the responsible customer. My role was to help him come up with a plausible sounding acceptable use policy and then contact the ISPs when he “disconnected” the customer. I declined to participate in this scheme. This doesn’t appear to have stopped him, though, if the rumors I hear are to be believed.
Waterfalling
Related to the fake ESP scheme is waterfalling. Spammers acquire lists of email addresses and then begin the process of cleaning them by mailing. In some cases, they mail through fake ESPs, as above. In other cases, they actually spread their traffic out across legitimate ISPs. As they mail the lists through the ESPs, they remove unsubscribes, bounces and complaints. When the list reaches a set cleanliness, they move it to another ESP. They repeat this, gradually moving through cleaner and cleaner ESPs. Eventually, they move the list to their own network and sell mailings to it as an opt-in list. It’s not opt-in, it’s just cleansed of all negative responders.
The companies abusing ESPs to clean their lists do tarnish the reputation of ESPs. While the responsible ESPs do disconnect the waterfallers, they usually do so after problems are detected. That being said, there are some companies that are constantly looking for “partnerships” at ESPs and the ESPs turn them away during the sales cycles.
Affiliates
While not necessarily an ESP problem there are some large companies out there that hire spammers to send acquisition email for them. They also send their own mail, both marketing and transactional, through ESPs. The issue for ESPs come when the URL blocks happen and the bad reputation of their customer’s mail bleeds back to the ESPs IP addresses. The ESP becomes known as “one of those places that mails for X” and their reputation falls accordingly. In some cases, even if the mail through the ESP is clean and opt-in, the ESP finds itself blocklisted for just doing business with a company that hires spammers.
I’ve had a couple clients recommended to me by ESPs because the ESP was dealing with a persistent spam block around this particular customer. The mail the customer sent through the ESP was opt-in, but the client was using an extensive network of affiliates to send spam for them. I collected a lot of examples of their spam from various affiliates, even gave them a couple of examples from my own email addresses. One of those addresses has not been actively used in 6 years. My client tells me they talked to their affiliates and that the affiliate assured them I had signed up, I just forgot. The client chose to believe the affiliate over me, despite the fact that I had many other examples. That client lost their ESP (and good for the ESP) but is still sending spam. I just got one advertising their stuff yesterday, at the same address I gave to them years ago, all images, hashbusters, domain hidden behind proxy, coming from a snowshoer network.
All of the companies I’ve talked about here describe themselves as legitimate email marketers. Even the company telling me I opted in to their mail was defending themselves and their affiliates as legitimate email marketers.

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Email related predictions for 2010

As my recent series of posts has indicated, I am seeing a lot of future changes in the email industry.

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