Recent Posts

Yahoo and Verizon

Mickey at Spamtacular has information about Verizon’s email system that will have relevance for anyone working in delivery.

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White House sending spam?

There has been some press about political spam recently. People are receiving email from the White House that they have not opted into. At a recent press conference a reporter challenged the press secretary to defend the practice.
Chris Wheeler over at Bronto blog points out that CAN SPAM doesn’t apply as this is political mail, and CAN SPAM only covers commercial email. He also notes that most of the mail came from “forward to a friend” links which the sender has little to no control over.
Gawker has a post up “Everything you need to know about Obama’s Spam-Gate.”
There are a lot of issues here. Chris asks a number of questions on his blog, that I encourage people to think about.

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Failed delivery of permission based email

A few weeks ago, ReturnPath published a study showing that 20% of permission based email was blocked. I previously discussed the definition of permission based email and that not all the mail described as permission based is actually sent with the permission of the recipient. However, I only consider this a small fraction of the mail RP is measuring, somewhere in the 3 – 5% range. What happens with the other 17 – 15% of that mail? Why is it being blocked?
There are 3 primary things I see that cause asked for and wanted email to be blocked.

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Maine prohibits marketing to minors

Last week, the state of Maine passed a law prohibiting marketing using personal information to minors without verifiable consent from a parent or guardian. From what I understand, this law started out as a prohibition on using health information for marketing and expanded to any personal information.
The law defines personal information as:

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More Gordon v. Virtumundo news

Eric Goldman reviews the appeals court decision in Gordon vs. Virtumundo.

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Delivery Blog Carnival – Selling, trading and renting email addresses

A couple weeks ago, I linked to a comment from a marketer mentioning that email addresses should be able to be traded around like snail mail addresses. I suggested this might be a good topic to hear from a lot of different people on.
Mickey posted List Rental is…. In that post he looked at how email is different from direct mail and how the attitudes are different as well.
The folks at Bronto got into the spirit of the blog carnival and Kristin, Kelly and Chris all contributed to a single post offering their perspectives on trading lists, intrusive marketing and delivery.
Al Iverson has two posts on buying lists. One is an older post talking about the delivery hassles and problems related to purchased lists from the perspective of a ESP delivery expert. Over on his SpamResource blog, he posts about the same issue from the perspective of a recipient who is tired of receiving spam.
I also posted on the issue, looking at how email is not snail mail and senders cannot be successful in email by applying the direct mail rules.
Thanks to everyone who submitted posts.

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9th circuit ruling in Gordon v. Virtumundo

The 9th circuit court of appeals issued their ruling in Gordon v. Virtumundo today. The ruling was heavily in favor of Virtumundo. I have not had time to read the ruling, but both Venkat and Mickey have posts on the case and the ruling.
This is another solid blow against anti-spammers suing spammers under state laws and CAN SPAM. The problem is that many of the cases are brought by people, and lawyers, who fail to understand that just because they don’t like something doesn’t make it illegal. Spammers do a lot of bad things, but the ones you can track enough to sue are generally not breaking the law. Sadly, cases like Gordon and Mummagraphics makes it harder for ISPs to sue spammers that are actively harming the ISP and the customers.

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Email is not direct mail

A few weeks ago someone commented on a previous post of mine about list purchasing saying that at some point senders should be able to trade and sell email lists like they trade and sell direct mail lists. As much as marketers may not like this, email is never going to be the free for all that direct mail is and they’re never going to have the ability to trade email addresses the way they do physical addresses.
I don’t think this “marketing opportunity” is going to be realized for two major reasons. One, marketing is intrusive and people are more resistant to intrusions in their email boxes than intrusions in other places. Two, marketers own many of the channels used for marketing, but they don’t own email.
Billboards, commercials, flyers dropped in the driveway, garbage in the mailbox, door-to-door salespeople, telemarketers interrupting dinner, pop-up ads that cover up the content on the website. All of these push marketing into the daily lives of people. Marketers set out to intrude and interrupt their targets. The interruptions often generate frustration and anger. Marketers also make it difficult, if not impossible, to opt-out of the marketing. “Put me on your do not call list” doesn’t always work. Requesting to be removed from a catalog list rarely works. The only way to avoid pop-ups is to avoid those websites that serve them. Door to door sales people just keep coming and each one is sure the “no soliciting” sign is not directed at them.
Marketers have created an over-saturation of marketing. People are frustrated and exasperated by the interruptions. Many feel powerless in the face of so many intrusions.
Email marketing is, in many ways, the ultimate in intrusive and interruptive marketing. The marketer can send email whenever they want and it waits to interrupt the recipient. Combine this with how people use email and it is a recipe for recipients being intolerant of unasked for email marketing.
Email is, at its heart, a way for people to communicate with one another. It is a more immediate and personal way of communicating than writing letters to each other. Email is closer to a replacement for phones than it is for a replacement of snail mail. People started seeing their inbox as a way to have close to real-time conversations. Marketing email, particularly unasked for marketing email, is often seen as an interruption of the conversation. Unasked for marketing email is much closer to a telemarketers calling during dinner than it is to receiving an unsolicited credit card offer in a mailbox.
People don’t really like unasked for marketing emails, many of them refer to such emails as spam.
People feel a lot of ownership over their inbox. This ownership results in loud calls to their ISPs to stop the spam. The ISPs have responded by providing more and more controls over who can intrude in any one users inbox. The end result is that end users have more control in this medium than they have in other types of intrusive and interruptive marketing. As long as the power is in the recipients hands, marketers will find it difficult to trade addresses around like they do for snail mail.
This individual control directs the actions of the ISPs. If enough customers tell an ISP that a particular sender is sending spam, then the ISP will block that mail. The ISPs are gatekeepers protecting their customers from spam. The power of one person blocking a single mail is multiplied when thousands of people block the same mail. Eventually, the ISP will stop the mail from getting to the users.
ISP customers have said, loud and clear, we do not like spam. ISPs responded by blocking spam, instituting lawsuits against spammers and promoting laws that make some types of spam illegal. Until the business model of ISPs change, that is they’re not making money from their customers and are instead making money from email marketers, the ISPs will continue to listen and set standards that make recipients happy.
In this one area marketing targets have more influence and power than marketers. Marketers can’t treat email like another direct channel because marketers don’t own the channel and don’t make the rules there. This is why trading address lists around is not going to become an acceptable or accepted practice.

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Contact addresses and spam

One of the challenges anyone doing business on the internet faces is how to provide contact information so that potential customers can reach you in a form that spammers can’t easily abuse. Contact forms are the classic method, but they can (and are) abused by spammers. We decided to try something different. About 2 months ago, we started using rotating contact addresses. Every day a new address is deployed on the contact form on our website. Each address is valid for a fixed period of time, and is then retired.
This seems to be working well for us. Spammers are harvesting the email addresses, but because they are only valid for a fixed period of time, the amount of spam in my mailbox is not overwhelming. I am spending less time searching for sales mails through spam. An interesting side effect is I can actually see who is harvesting addresses and spamming.
It’s not perfect, I’m still getting spam to that address. But it’s spam at a level where I’m not losing real mail.

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New Delivery tools

A couple nifty new delivery tools were published over the weekend.
Mickey published Bounce P.I. where senders can paste in an error message or bounce and it will tell you what filter generated it. If the rejection is unrecognized, it will flag the message internally and it will be researched to see if the filter can be identified.
Steve has a new tool at the DKIMCore site. The key generating tool and the record checking tool have been up for a while. This weekend, though, he published a tool to check the validity the DKIM record published in DNS. Tool output shows if the record is valid, the version and the public key.

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