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TWSD: Run, hide and obfuscate

Spammers and spamming companies have elevated obfuscating their corporate identities to an artform. Some of the more dedicated, but just this side of legal, spammers set up 3 or 4 different front companies: one to sell advertising, one or more to actually send mail, one to get connectivity and one as a backup for when the first three fail. Because they use rotating domain names and IP addresses all hidden behind fake names or “privacy protection services”, the actual spammer can be impossible to track without court documents.
One example of this is Ken Magill’s ongoing series of reports about EmailAppenders.
Aug 5, 2008 Ouch: A List-Purchase Nighmare
Sept 9, 2008 Umm… About EmailAppenders’ NYC Office
Sept 15, 2008 E-mail Appending Plot Thickens
Nov 11, 2008 EmailAppenders Hawking Bogus List, Claims Publisher
Dec 23, 2008 Internet Retailer Sues EmailAppenders
Feb 1, 2009 EmailAppenders Update
Mar 10, 2009 Another Bogus E-mail List Claimed
April 14, 2009 EmailAppenders a Court No-Show, Says Internet Retailer
April 21, 2009 EmailAppenders Gone? New Firm Surfaces
May 5, 2009 EmailAppenders Back with New Web Site, New Name
Their actions, chronicled in his posts, are exactly what I see list providers, list brokers and “affiliate marketers” do every day. They hide, they lie, they cheat and they obfuscate. When someone finally decides to sue, they dissolve one company and start another. Every new article demonstrates what spammers do in order to stay one step ahead of their victims.
While Ken has chronicled one example of this, there are dozens of similar scammers. Many of them don’t have a persistent reporter documenting all the company changes, so normal due diligence searches fail to turn up any of the truth. Companies looking for affiliates or list sources often fall victim to scammers and spammers, and suffer delivery and reputation problems as a result.
Companies that insist on using list sellers, lead generation companies and affilates must protect themselves from these sorts of scammers. Due diligence can be a challenge, because of the many names, domains and businesses these companies hide behind. Those tasked with investigating affiliates, address sources or or mailing partners can use some of the same investigative techniques Ken did to identify potential problems.

The Weekend Effect

Sending mail only Monday through Friday can cause reputation and delivery problems at some ISPs, even when senders are doing everything right. This “weekend effect” is a consequence of how ISPs measure reputation over time.
Most ISPs calculating complaint rate use a simple calculation. They measure how many “this is spam” clicks a source IP generates in a 24 hour period. Then they divide that number by how many emails were delivered to the inbox in the same 24 hour period.
The weekend effect happens when a sender sends on weekdays and not on the weekend thus lowering the number of emails delivered to the to the inbox. Recipients, however, still read mail on the weekend, and they still hit the “this is spam” button on the email. Even if the number of “this is spam” clicks is lower than a normal weekday, with no incoming email the rate of spam complaints goes above ISP thresholds. Even a very well run mailing program may see spikes in complaint rate on the weekends.
Now, when the ISPs are measuring complaint rates over time, they take the average of the average complaint rates. If the rates spike high enough on the weekend (and they can spike to the 1 – 3% range, even for a well run list), that can hurt the senders’ reputation.
The good news is that ISPs are aware of the weekend effect and take this into account when manually looking at complaints. The bad news is that not all of the major ISPs take this into account when programatically calculating reputation.
There isn’t very much senders can do to combat the weekend effect, except be aware this can happen and may be responsible for poor mailing performances on Monday. If you are seeing delivery problems you think may be a result of the weekend effect you can contact the ISPs and ask for manual review of your reputation. Some ISPs can provide manual mitigation for senders with otherwise clean stats. d

Going out of business email strategies

Chad White of Smith-Harmon posted a report today on shutting down email marketing programs when going out of business. He looks in detail at how a number of companies handled their email marketing during the going-out-of-business process. There is a very solid mix of examples of how companies handle things. Some companies do things very badly, like never mention over email that they’re going out of business or neglect to follow CAN SPAM regulations. Others used their list as a communications tool that survived the dissolution of the parent company.
The full report is well worth a read, but the take home messages are clear.

How Spamfilters Work

AllSpammedUp has a post describing the primary techniques anti-spam filters use to identify mail as spam or not spam. While is this not sender or delivery focused knowledge, it is important for people sending mail to have a basic understanding of filtering mechanisms. Without that base knowledge, it’s difficult to troubleshoot problems and resolve issues.

Confirmed opt-in

I spent the morning in multiple venues correcting mis-understandings of confirmed opt-in. The misunderstandings weren’t so much that people didn’t understand how COI works, but more they didn’t understand all the implications.
In one venue, the conversation centered around how small a portion of deliverability the initial subscription process affects. Sure, sending unwanted, unexpected email can and does cause reputation problems, but merely using COI as a subscription methodolgy doesn’t automatically give a sender a good reputation or good delivery. Senders using COI as a subscription practice need to also need to send relevant and engaging mail that their recipients expect to receive. They need to handle their bounces well and purge or re-engage inactive subscribers. They need to keep their complaints low and their responses high.
How you manage subscriptions is only one factor in reputation schemes, and even if the subscription method is COI other factors can negate any bonus involved.
The second conversation involved Ken challenging me on the comment I left on his quiz yesterday. I said COI wasn’t foolproof and he challenged me to explain how. I did, and he’ll be following up next week.

Delivery news April 2009

Penton Media’s Marketing Practices
Ken Magill responds to critics of Penton’s email marketing practices in an article out today. His article is quite open and points out that some of the things Penton does are not good.

Poor delivery is not always about spam

There are days I think we have trained people too well to believe every delivery problem is a misplaced spam block. We also have people trained to expect near 100% immediate delivery from send to inbox.
The problem is, email isn’t 100% reliable. It’s close. Very close. But sometimes mail just fails. It’s not because the ISPs hate you. It’s sometimes not even because the mail looks like spam.
Sometimes Mail Just Fails.
One of the challenges of working in email delivery is knowing enough to be able to separate out the random delivery failures from real delivery issues.

What Mark Said

Mark Brownlow skewers the arguments from opt-out proponents. A definite must read.

Reputation as measured by the ISPs

Part 3 in an ongoing series on campaign stats and measurements. In this installment, I will look a little closer at what other people are measuring about your email and how that affects your reputation at the ISPs.
Part 1: Campaign Stats and Measurements
Part 2: Measuring Open Rate
Reputation at the ISPs is an overall measure of how responsive recipients are to your email. ISPs also look at how much valid email you are sending. Anything the ISP can measure and use to distinguish good mail from bad is used in calculating reputation.
Some of the major metrics ISPs use include the following.
Invalid Address Rates
The ISPs count how much mail from any particular IP address is hitting non-existent addresses. If you are mailing a large number of email addresses that do not exist (550 user unknown), this is a suggestion that your address collection techniques are not very good. Responsible mailers do have the occasional bad address, including typos, expired/abandoned addresses, but the percentage in comparison to the number of real email addresses is low. How low is low? Public numbers suggest problems start at 10% user unknowns, but conversations with ISP employees show they consider lower levels a hint there may be a problem.
To calculate bounce rate ISPs take the total number of addresses that were for invalid accounts and divide that by the total number of addresses that the sender attempted to send mail to. Rates above 10% may cause significant delivery issues on their own, rates lower that 10% may still contribute to poor delivery through poor reputation scores.
Spamtraps
ISPs pay a lot of attention to how much mail is hitting their “trap” or “bait” accounts. There are a number of different sources of these trap accounts: old abandoned email addresses, addresses that never existed or even role accounts. Hits to a trap account tells the ISP there are addresses on your list that did not opt-in to receive mail. And if there are some addresses they know about that did not opt-in, it is likely that there are other addresses that did not opt in.
Spamtraps tend to be treated as an absolute number, not as a percentage of emails. Even a single spamtrap on a list can significantly harm delivery. According to the ReturnPath Benchmark report lists with a single spamtrap had nearly 20% worse delivery than lists without spamtraps.
This is spam clicks (FBL complaints)
Complaints from users are heavily used by ISPs. This tells them directly how many people are objecting to your email. In this case, permission is removed from the equation. Even if a sender has permission to send email, the recipient can say “no, I don’t want this, it is spam.” The ISPs put more weight on what their users tell them than on what the senders tell them.

TWSD: Lying and Hiding

Another installment in my ongoing series: That’s What Spammers Do. In today’s installment we take a look at a company deceiving recipients and hiding their real identity.
One of my disposable addresses has been getting heavily spammed from mylife.com. The subject lines are not just deceptive, they are provably lies. The mail is coming from random domains like urlprotect.com or choosefrequency.com or winnernotice.com advertising links at safetyurl.com or childsafeblogging.com or usakidprotect.com.
The spam all claims someone is “searching for…” at their website. The only thing is, the email address is associated with a fake name I gave while testing a website on behalf of a client. I know what website received the data and I know what other data was provided during the signup process. I also know that the privacy policy at the time said that my data would not be shared and that only the company I gave the information to would be sending me email.
Just more proof that privacy policies aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. But that’s not my real issue here.
The real issue is that I am receiving mail that is clearly deceptive. The subject lines of the emails up until yesterday were “(1) New Message – Someone Searching for You, Find Out…” Yesterday, I actually clicked through one of the messages to confirm that the emails were ending up at mylife.com. After that, the subject lines of the emails changed to “(1) New Person is Searching for You.” I don’t know for sure that my click has caused the change in subject lines, but the timing seems a bit coincidental.
It’s not that someone, somewhere gave mylife.com bad data, or that someone typed a name into the mylife.com search engine and the mylife.com database showed that name and my email address were the same. Neither this name or this email address show up in a google search and I can say with certainty that this is a unique address and name combination given to a specific website. Therefore, the subject lines are clearly and demonstrably lies.
The spams are also coming from different domains and advertising links in different domains. The content is identical, the CAN SPAM addresses are identical. While the court may not rule this is deceptive under the rules of CAN SPAM, it certainly is an attempt to avoid domain level spam filters.
Who are mylife.com? Well, their website and the CAN SPAM address on their spam claims they are the company formerly known as reunion.com. I’ve talked about reunion.com here before. They have a history of harvesting addresses from users address books. They were sued for deceptive email practices under California law, but won the case just recently. They seem to think that the court case was permission to send deceptive email and have thus ramped up their deceptive practices.
If you are a legitimate email marketer, there are a couple take home messages here.
1) Spammers send mail with different domains, from different IP addresses, that contain identical content, landing pages and CAN SPAM addresses. Legitimate marketers should not rotate content and sends through different domains or different IP addresses. Pick your domain, pick your IP and stick with it.
1a) Spammers use randomly chosen domain names and cycle through domains frequently. Legitimate marketers must not use unrelated domains in marketing. Use a domain name that relates to your product, your industry or you.
2) Spammers send mail with deceptive subject lines. Legitimate marketers should make sure their subject lines are clear and truthful.
3) Spammers send mail in violation of the privacy policy under which information was collected. Legitimate marketers should be very careful to handle data in accordance with their privacy policies.
That’s what spammers do. Is that what you do?