Recent Posts

Dealing with blacklists

Al has a good post listing the top 5 things senders should remember when dealing with blacklists.
One of the critical things to remember about blocklists is that they are an early warning sign. Sure, some of them are one crank and his cat and will not hurt your overall delivery. A sender may be listed for totally spurious reasons . On the other hand, many of the widely used public lists and the private lists at the big ISPs, list IPs that they see as doing something wrong.
The challenge for anyone listed on any IP based blocklist is to look inside and determine what it is that they’re doing that caused the listing. The first step is to look at the technical issues, does your mail look like something coming out of infected bots? Is there a configuration problem? If the answer is no, then senders have to look at their practices. Are they sending mail to people who don’t expect it? Are they sending mail to people who didn’t ask for it? Most listings that will affect large numbers of recipients fall into the above 2 categories: technical or practices.
Technical problems can be fixed easily, once they’re identified. Permission or practice problems can also be fixed, but may require a sender reassess how they are using email and what value email brings to the business.

How NOT to get your mail unblocked

My friend Barry™ contacted me earlier this week to rant about senders contacting him asking for blocks to be lifted.

They are all Barry. Listen to Barry

Al has a guest post up from an ISP rep (now universally referred to as Barry) about senders contacting ISPs. It lists things senders do that Barry Don’t Like.
Listen to Barry.
There are also comments from various other Barrys in the comments. Those are worth reading, too.

Matt Blumberg joins the DMA Board

Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath, announced on his blog today that he has joined the board of the DMA. The blog post is both an explanation of why he did it and an agenda for what he wants to accomplish.

Who are you and why are you mailing me?

I’ve mentioned here before that I use tagged addresses whenever I sign up for. This does help me mentally sort out what’s real spam and what’s just mail I’ve forgotten I’ve signed up for.
Yesterday, I received and email from e-fense.com thanking me for my interest in their new product. The mail came to a tagged address, but not a tag that I would have given to e-fense.com. Their opening paragraph said:

Permission: it may not be what you think it is

I’ve talked frequently about permission on this blog, and mentioned over and over again that senders should correctly set expectations at the time they collect permission. Permission isn’t permission if the recipient doesn’t know what they’re agreeing to receive.

TWSD: My lunch is not spam

My ISP information page occasionally gets trackback pings from various blog posts. This week one of the trackbacks was from a blog post titled “One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch.” The theme of the blog post was that email marketers are poor, put upon business people that have to contend with all sorts of horrible responses from recipients, spam filtering companies and ISPs.
Since the poster took the time to link to my blog, I thought I’d take the time to look in detail at his post and talk about how likely it is to work.

Suppressing email addresses: it's good for everyone

Every sender, big or small, should have the ability to suppress sending to any particular email address. They must, absolutely, be able to stop sending mail to anyone for any reason. Not only is this a legal requirement in every jursidiction that has laws about email marketing, it’s just good business sense.
What happens when marketers fail to be able to suppress email addresses? At some point they’re going to mail someone who gets annoyed enough with them to make it public that they are too incompetent to run an email program.
This happened to the folks over at spamfighter.com recently. They have been spamming Neil Schwartzman (spamfighter, Executive director of CAUCE North America, Director of Standards and Certification at ReturnPath) since somewhere in 2007. Yes, really, 2007. Neil has asked them politely to stop spamming him. He’s explained he’s not actually using their software. They appear to be incapable of running a suppression list, despite telling him 3 times that they have removed his address.
Showing much more restraint than I would have with a sender who couldn’t stop sending me email, Neil gave them years to fix their process before blogging about his experiences. Instead of fixing their broken process they instead responded to his blog post insisting their mail wasn’t spam because they weren’t sending Viagra mail or 3rd party offers.
We can argue about the definition of opt-in, we can argue about whether registration is permission, we can argue about a lot of things, but when the recipients says “stop sending me email” and a sender says “we’ll stop sending you email” and then fails to actually stop sending email I think the recipient is fully justified in calling the email spam. Sorry spamfighter.com, your process is broken and your inability to fix it 2 years after the brokenness was brought to your attention does not give anyone a good impression.
Every email sender should have the ability to stop sending mail to recipients. If that’s not currently possible with your technology, it should be a very high development priority.

Demanding everything might mean you get nothing

What do you do when you have a potential customers name and address, but know nothing else about them? You’d really like to be able to send them some targeted marketing, ideally via email. You send them a good old-fashioned letter asking them to volunteer more contact information and answers to a bunch of business classification questions – “What industry are you in?”, “How many employees do you have?”, “What might you want to buy from us?”, that sort of thing.
Verisign – the people who’ll sell you certificates for SSL websites – sent me exactly that letter yesterday. And over and above their costs for sending the mail, developing the online survey and capturing the data they’re also offering a $10 gift card to everyone who fills in their survey. They must really want that data and those subscribers.
And a fair bit of the work I do is security-related and I use SSL fairly heavily, so I’d be interested in the occasional email from Verisign. If they pitch me a decent offer for an interesting product I’d even be likely to buy it. This is just how email marketing can work well and make both sender and recipient happy – much better, from my perspective, than intrusive cold calls from sales reps desperate to sell me something interrupting my work day.
I fill in their online survey. I give them an email address. I don’t give them a ‘phone number.
And they refuse to accept the form, because there’s no ‘phone number. I’m mildly annoyed that I’ve wasted five minutes filling in a useless form; they’ve lost a potential subscriber. Neither of us is happy with the result.
Being sensitive to recipients preferences is likely to make them happier and more receptive to your message, and improve the effectiveness of your overall campaign.
Refusing to let someone sign up for email marketing because they don’t want your telemarketing is a fairly extreme example, but recipients preferences is something to bear in mind elsewhere in your campaigns. If you’re mailing daily maybe you’re losing subscribers simply because the volume is too high. Possibly offering an alternative “weekend edition” with the best bits of the weeks daily editions would work better for them. Offering them the option to sign up for that instead on the unsubscription page for your daily list might help you keep them as a subscriber.

Email is dead…

Or so the WSJ technology blog would have us believe.

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts.
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