Recent Posts

What a world!

One of the fascinating things on the Internet is how a few dedicated people can create free, or mostly free, resources that become an important part of infrastructure for companies around the world. Blocklists are one of the prime examples of this phenomenon. Almost all of the widely used blocklists started out as a resource provided by a single person, generally using recovered hardware on donated bandwidth. There is a consistent time commitment, but no more than any other hobby.
As the list gains in popularity, the resource commitment increases. Hardware purchases and upgrades need to be made, bandwidth bills increase, more and more time must be spent dealing both with people using the list and people affected by listings. Truly popular lists may have to invest in ticketing systems and diagnostic infrastructure. Websites need to be maintained. The list may now be part of the infrastructure at far flung corporations or ISPs. People affected by the listings may be demanding immediate responses. The hobby is now the equivalent a job and people who aren’t paying the maintainer rely on that “hobby” for their own networks.
Once a list is successful, then maintainer needs to expand infrastructure, build up redundancy and have defenses against various attacks. This is the point where they start talking to volunteers to manage some of the extra work. Typically they find individuals or corporations willing to donate bandwidth and rack space.
Successful lists rely on volunteers or paid staff to handle listings and delistings as well as the databases, websites and DNS servers required to host a public service. None of this is unusual, many of the people maintaining lists are strong proponents of the open source software and use that to model the blocklist services as well. However, it’s always a good thing to remember that some of the people maintaining blocklists are doing this not for any personal profit, but as a way to contribute to the community on the Internet.
One thing I didn’t mention above, but deserves to be recognized is that the maintainer needs to be someone with people skills and the ability to handle conflict. This is true for internal conflict, among the volunteers or the service providers as well as external conflict with people affected by the blocklist. There is a lot of conflict around blocklists and it’s critically important that the maintainer, or their designated representative, be able to handle angry people in emotionally charged situations.
Why did this come up today? One of the top blocklists, SORBS announced over the weekend (at least here on the west coast of the US) that without someone stepping up to donate bandwidth and space that SORBS would be shut down in July. Other bloggers have commented on this. In case anyone was unclear on the commitment it takes to maintain a space, Michelle mentions on her shutdown post SORBS needs a full 42U of rack space for the hardware and has commented on spam-l that bandwidth costs are estimated by her current host to be 200K a month.
Given the time and resource constraints it is unlikely that SORBS users will see uninterrupted service. It is possible that the data will be moved and hosted elsewhere, however, current SORBS users may want to stop querying the lists now and wait for a resolution to be announced.

Pizzanomics

Ben at Mailchimp has a very funny post about how pizza is a metric for how big your company is.

Choosing Twitter over Email to engage customers

Eric Goldman has an interesting blog post over at hit Technology and Marketing Law blog comparing and contrasting twitter and email. One of the reasons he likes Twitter is that it gives him, the ‘subscriber’ (follower in Twitspeak) control. There’s no chance that the company will sell his data. And, if the company does tweet too much that is uninteresting or irrelevant, the follower can ‘unsubscribe’ (or unfollow) without any fear that the company will override or lose the unsub request.
To my mind, the biggest problem with Twitter for B2C communication is the 140 character limit. On the other hand, it means that companies need to be clear in their language and concise in their tweets. Maybe the limited space is actually a feature not a bug.

Y! and ARF

Someone twittered me a question about Y! and their ARF reports. Apparently the ARF header is not including AM/PM which is causing problems for some people. Yahoo is aware of the issue and looking into it.
On a housekeeping note, sorry for the lack of postings this week. I’m still recoving from the trip and while I have a lot of things I want to talk about (including responding to the great comments on transactional email) I am swamped with catching up.

Live from MAAWG!

OK, so I’m not at MAAWG any longer and I can’t blog about what happens there even if I was. However, there is an article at PC World about the conference.
I’ve been going to MAAWG conferences for many years now. Not every one, being a small company means that I can’t just take off for a week, particularly overseas where phones don’t work (something solved by an iPhone 3G). But I’ve been to quite a few of them.
I have to say the last few conferences have really impressed me. The quality of discussions and the training sessions have been full of useful information. Even for someone who has been around as long as I have, there is always something new to learn. I strongly encourage people who want to stop abuse in the messaging sphere to consider joining. Everyone is hurt by messaging abuse: end-users, senders and receivers. We all have a role to play in stopping abuse, and MAAWG is one way to learn about what you can do.
On a more personal note it was great to meet new folks and to see familiar faces. And a big thanks to all of you who took the time to tell me you liked this blog. Thank you for reading!
EDIT: Another press article about the conference.

Transactional email

I was talking with some people at the conference yesterday and we started discussing what makes an email transactional. I am reluctant to say the best definition we came up with was “I know it when I see it” but it was close. The interesting thing was that most of the participants agreed that we all used the term the same.
I thought I’d ask readers here: How do you define transactional email? I’m interested in this both from the perspective of a sender and from the perspective of a receiver.

Best time to send email: analysis and discussion

Mark Brownlow (who I don’t think is here in Ams, much to my disappointment) wrote a long assessment of how to determine what is the best time to send email. He walks through the questions and the data that a sender should evaluate when making the decision when to best send email.
I have previously posted about my views on the best time to send email. There is no one best time to send email. In fact, my experience leads me to believe if someone said the best time to send email is at 4pm on Tuesday afternoon then 4pm on Tuesday afternoon would rapidly become the absolute worst time to send email.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I really like Mark’s #4 recommendation.

Yahoo fixed erroneous rejection problem

Yahoo announced over the weekend that they fixed their rejection problem. It may take some time to filter out to all their MTAs, but they do believe the issue is resolved.

Tragic mistakes in appending

Last week, Chief Marketer ran an article listing the Top 10 E-mail Appending Mistakes to Avoid. While the article has some good information, I think it missed the mark. In most cases the first mistake companies make when deciding to do an appending run on a customer list is: to append the list.
There is no permission with an appended list. None. Theoretically, senders can kinda get around the lack of permission by sending one email asking users to opt-in. However, every company I’ve ever suggested that to has recoiled in shock and horror. Their protests are all eerily similar.

CAN SPAM Checklist

Mickey has done a comprehensive checklist looking at all the things you should do to comply with CAN SPAM.