Recent Posts

Maine backs away from new marketing restrictions

The WSJ reports that politicians in Maine have figured out that the new Maine law prohibiting collecting information from teenagers without parental permission is badly written and has a lot of problems.
The Attorney General has decided not to enforce the law as it stands. The law does contain private right of action, so there may be private suits filed against companies.
I can’t necessarily fault the state senator who drafted the legislation for her intentions.

Links for 9/2/09

People are still talking about the White House spamming. At Al Iverson’s Spam Resource there are two posts, one from Jaren Angerbauer titled Guest Post: Email and the White House and another from Al himself titled White House Spam, Signup Forgery, and GovDelivery. Both are insightful discussions of the spam that the White House has been sending. Over at ReturnPath, Stephanie Miller talks about how the publicity surrounding the spam is great PR for permission.
Stefan Pollard has an article at ClickZ looking at how an apology email in response to a recipient visible email mistake can actually make the fallout worse.
Web Ink Now documents one recipient’s experience with a bad, but all too common, subscription practice.
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Don’t forget to participate in the DKIM implementation survey. For ESPs. For ISPs. Check back next week for results.

DKIM implementation survey

DKIM has been a hot topic of discussion on some of my mailing lists today. One of the open questions is what is holding up adoption of DKIM. I have my own theories, but thought I’d throw out some questions to see how ESPs and ISPs are currently using domain based reputation.
I have set up two surveys one for ESPs and one for ISPs. Responses are anonymous.
I’ll collect responses for a week and share the results.

Email as a PR problem

Email is a great way to connect to and engage with people. It is also a medium where the sender doesn’t get to control the message as well as they might in other media. This means that sometimes email campaigns go wrong in a way that drives a national news story about how you are a spammer.
In the stress and flurry of dealing with public accusations of spamming many companies overlook the fact that the underlying issue is they are sending mail that the recipients don’t want or don’t expect. If there is a public uproar about your mail as spam, then there is a good chance something in your email strategy isn’t working.
Even in the recent White House as spammers strategy, there is a strong chance that they are actually using reasonable and industry standard methods to collect email addresses. However, in their case, they are a large target for people to forge email addresses in forms. “Bob doesn’t like the president, but I’ll sign him up for this list so he can learn how things really are.” or “Joe doesn’t like the democrats so I’ll sign him up for their mailings just to piss him off.”

When you are confronted with an email campaign that upsets a large number of people there are a number of steps you should take.
Step 1: Gather information
This includes information internally about what actually happened with the campaign and information from the people who are complaining.
Externally: Get copies of the emails with full headers. If you’re working with people who do not want to reveal any details of the mail they received then you may not be able to fully investigate it, but if they do you will have everything you need right there. Figure out where their address came from (you do have good audit trails for all your email addresses, right?).
Internally: Talk to everyone who worked on that particular campaign. This includes the geek down in the IT department who manages the database. Figure out if anything internally went wrong and mail was sent to people it wasn’t intended for. I know of at least 2 cases where a SQL query was incorrectly set up and the unsubscribe list was mailed by accident.
Step 2: Identify the underlying problem
Look at all the available information and identify what happened. Was there a bad source of email addresses? Did someone submit addresses of spamtraps to a webform? Was there a technical problem? Again, talk to your people internally. In many companies I have noticed a tendency to try and troubleshoot problems like this at very high levels (VP or C-level executives) without involving the employees who probably know exactly what happened. This sometimes leads to mis-identifying the problem. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it.
Step 3: Identify the solution
Once you know what the problem was, you can work out a solution. Sometimes these are fairly simple, sometimes not so much. On the simple end you may have to implement some data hygiene. On the more complex end, you may need to change how data is handled completely.
Step 4: Inform the relevant parties of the solution
Make a statement about the problem, that you’ve identified it and that you’ve taken steps to fix it. How you do this is a little outside my area of expertise, although I have participated in crafting the message, rely on your PR folks on how to communicate this. In the Internet space, honesty is prized over spin, so do remember that.
Every company is going to have the occasional problem. In the email space, that tends to result in the company being labeled a spammer. Instead of being defensive about the label, use the accusation to drive internal change to stop your mail from being labeled spam by the recipients.

Changes at Comcast Postmaster

Two changes at the Comcast Postmaster page that I think are worthy of mentioning.

Subscription practices in the wild

It’s always interesting to look at what other email marketers are doing and how closely their practices align with what I am recommending to clients.
Today’s example is a welcome message I received from Marriott. During my recent trip to visit a client, I gave Marriott my email address. They sent me a welcome message, primarily text that looked good even with images turned off. The text of the email told me why I was receiving the email and what I could expect.

Blocking specific domains

Multiple times in the last few days people have asked me the question “What do you think about blocking domains owned by anti-spam companies as a way to prevent blocklisting?” The question is not necessarily a bad one, and there are cases where blocking mail to specific domains is a good decision. Often, though, if a spam prevention program consists solely of avoiding sending email to people that may be able to cause delivery pain, there are deeper problems that should be addressed.
When I am asked about doing so, my first question is always “Why do you want to do this? What are you trying to accomplish?” Typically, the person asking the question will tell me they are attempting to prevent employees of anti-spam companies from getting mail that they will then report to the operations team as spam.
First, employees don’t always have the ability to get a specific sender blocked just because the sender spammed them. It’s not necessarily something senders should rely on, but often there are policies in place to prevent an employee from using the company to punish a “personal” spammer. And even when someone who can add a sender to their global blocking list receives spam, the listing still must comply with the corporate policies. In other words, just mailing someone “powerful” isn’t enough to result in a block. It may bring the sender to the attention of the company, but unless over all stats and show that the sender is a problem, a listing won’t happen.
Second, employees at companies do sometimes opt in to mail from commercial senders. In fact, I had one discussion with a anti-spam company about a client who was seeing intermittent delivery problems. I sent in the information about the client and the employee handling the case said “Oh, them! I signed up for mail from them. Yeah, they’re a good bunch and their stats are reasonable, they shouldn’t have any more problems.” And they didn’t.
Third, many of us who work in email, particularly those of us who have been around for a long time on the anti-spam side, have our own domains and use multiple email addresses. Just removing clearly identifiable anti-spam domains does not mean that a sender will never spam someone powerful or important. It is impossible to clean off all those email addresses from lists. We have many, many addresses, including ones at ISPs.
One extreme example is AOL.com. Every AOL employee has an AOL.com address and they are indistinguishable from the addresses used by AOL.com customers. But, if a sender spams an employee with access to the anti-spam system, and the stats are bad enough to justify a block, then that sender may see poor AOL delivery. But senders aren’t really going to block mail to all AOL.com addresses, just to avoid that scenario.
When is blocking emails to domains or a set of email addresses a good idea?

Spam that's not spam

Steve and I were talking this evening and I mentioned to him that I got “a lot of spam that wasn’t really spam. Know what I mean?”
He did. But if I tell that to you, what does it mean to you?
More on this in a couple days, but I’m onsite at a client’s for the next few days so it may take me a plane ride home to put all the thoughts down.

You might be a spammer if…

… the best thing you have to say about your email practices is “They’re CAN SPAM compliant.”
… text to .gif is a vital part of your email generation process
… you have to mail from multiple ESPs in order to get good delivery
Please contribute your own in the comments.
I’d also like to thank Al for guest posting 2 days this week. Thanks, Al!

E-Postage Just Won't Die

E-Postage is back! Wired covers a report from New Scientist. Here’s what they have to say: “Yahoo’s researchers want you to voluntarily slap a one-cent stamp on your outgoing e-mails, with proceeds going to charity, in a bid to cut down on spam. Can doing good really do away with spam, which consumes 33 terawatt hours of electricity every year, not to mention way too much of our time?”
Alex Rubin at Return Path says hold up, wait a minute. He writes: “Our contacts at Yahoo! tell us this idea is purely in the research realm, and is not scheduled for development in Yahoo! Mail. In other words: it isn’t even vaporware and isn’t likely to be a part of the Yahoo! mail system anytime soon.” He goes on to say (I’m paraphrasing) that oops, Yahoo didn’t really intend for this research to become public.
So, apparently, there are no plans for Yahoo to roll out E-Postage today, tomorrow or next week. Nothing to see here, beyond a simple web site and some thoughts from a Yahoo researcher. Some individual’s hopeful vision for the future, not a corporate announcement of an upcoming product.
E-Postage has always been a neat idea, I’ve thought. A neat idea beset by insurmountable problems. First, end users don’t want to pay for the email messages they send, they want all you can eat. With years of webmail providers offering free email access, you’ll have a heck of a time convincing somebody’s grandmother that they have to pony up a nickel to be able to email the grandkids.
Then, answer me this: Who’s going to handle the economics on the back-end? And any time you have a computer storing a resource (like, say, account information for that tiny little bit of money you’ll need to be able to send me an email), that information can be hacked, exploited, stolen. You think spammers are actually going to pony up? Why would they? They’ll just hack into millions of exploitable computers, stealing five cents from everyone along the way, and gleefully shoveling millions of spams into millions of inboxes.
This concept of E-Postage, either paying money to send email, or spending “computational power” to send email, has been kicking around for years. Periodically, some researcher comes up with the idea anew, and suggests that we all immediately adopt their sure fire plan to solve the world’s spam problem, immediately, pennies at a time. These ideas never seem to go anywhere. And that will never change until somebody can actually convince most of the world to adopt their proposed scheme. Will it ever happen? Never say never, but I have no plans to rush out and buy e-Stamps any time soon.
— Al Iverson