Recent Posts

What is an email address? (part three)

As promised last week, here are some actual recommendations for handling email addresses.
First some things to check when capturing an email address from a user, or when importing a list. These will exclude some legitimate email addresses, but not any that anyone is likely to actually be using. And they’ll allow in some email addresses that are technically not legal, by erring on the side of simple checks. But they’re an awful lot better than many of the existing email address filters.

What is an email address? (part two)

Yesterday I talked about the technical definitions of an email address. Eventually on Monday I’m going to talk about some useful day-to-day rules about email address acquisition and analysis, but first I’m going to take a detour into tagging or mailboxing email addresses.
Tagging an email address is something the owner of an email address can do to make it easier to handle incoming email. It works by adding an extra word to the local part of the email address separated by a special character, such as “+”, “=” or “-“. So, if my email address is steve@example.com, and I’m signing up for the MAAWG mailing lists I can sign up with the email address steve+maawg@example.com. When mail is sent to steve+maawg@example.com it will be delivered to my steve@example.com mailbox, but I’ll know that it’s mail from MAAWG. I can use that tag to whitelist that mail, to filter it to it’s own mailbox and a bunch of other useful things.
In some ways this is similar to recent disposable email address services, but rather than being a third party service it’s something that’s been built in to many mailservers for well over a decade. It doesn’t require me to create each new address at a web page, instead I can make tags up on the fly. And it works at my regular mail domain.
If you’re an ESP it can be interesting to look for tagged addresses in uploaded lists. If it’s a list owned by Kraft and you see the email address steve+gevalia@example.com in the list, that’s a strong sign that that email address at least was really volunteered to the list owner. If you see the email address steve+microsoft@example.com then it’s a strong sign that it wasn’t, and you might want to look harder at where the list came from.
One reason that this is relevant to email address capture is that tagged addresses are something that you should expect people, especially more sophisticated users of email, to use to sign up to mailing lists and that they’re something you don’t want to discourage. Yet many web signup forms forbid entering email addresses with a “+” or, worse, have bugs in them that map a “+” sign in the email address to a space – leading to the signup failing at best, or the wrong email address being added to the list at worst. This really annoys people who use tagged addresses to help manage their email, and they’re often exactly the sort of tech-savvy people who make a lot of online purchases you want to have on your lists.
More on Monday.

What is an email address? (part one)

Given we deal with email addresses every day, dozens or thousands or millions of them, it seems a bit strange to ask what an email address is – but given some of the problems people have with the grubbier corners of address syntax it’s actually an interesting question.
There are two real standards that define what is a valid email address and what isn’t. The most complex is RFC 5322 – Internet Message Format, which describes all sorts of things about the structure of an email, including what’s valid to put in From: and To: headers. It’s really too liberal in what it allows an email address to look like to be terribly useful, but it does provide for one very commonly used feature – the friendly from where the name that’s displayed to the recipient is not just the email address.

ISP Information pages

I have posted a ISP Information Page. Right now it contains links to Postmaster pages, Whitelist signup pages and FBL signup pages. I have some ideas on what information would be helpful to add, but would like to hear what types of info people would like to have easy access to.
What do you think I should add to the page?

How to devalue your mailing lists

This morning I got spam about college basketball – Subject: Inside: your ESPN Tourney Guide. That’s anything but unusual, but this spam got through my spam filters and into my inbox. That’s a rare enough event that I’m already annoyed before I click on the mail in order to mark it as spam.
Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged address that I only gave to Adobe. Sure enough, it’s Adobe and ESPN co-branded spam about college basketball sent to an Adobe list.
Down at the bottom of the email there’s a blob of tiny illegible text, in very pale grey on white. Buried in there is an opt-out link: “If you’d prefer not to receive e-mail like this from Adobe in the future, please click here to unsusbscribe“.
I’d prefer not to receive college sports spam from anyone, including Adobe, so I click on it and find a big empty white webpage with this in the middle of it:

RoadRunner FBL live

RoadRunner sent out email today announcing their new FBL is live.

Marketing reports

Two marketing reports were reviewed today in other blogs.
Stefan Pollard writes at the Merkle report showing that recipients really will add a sender’s address to their address book, but that they are picky about which senders they do this for. His article also provides a number of suggestions for how to be a sender that is added to the address book.
Meanwhile, Matt Vernhout discusses the Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study published by Smith Harmon. Unsurprisingly, the study found that welcome emails were very important to future deliverability.
Happy Friday!

Asking the right question

My job as a consultant does involve answering questions and solving problems. Often the most important, and most overlooked, thing that I do is change the question that clients are asking. It is not that this changes the problem or even, really, changes the solution. It does change how people think of the problem, and changing how they think of the problem drives better solutions.
This can be applied to the current Email Experience Council (EEC) discussion on metrics and defining what a render rate was. Loren has a post up today detailing a number of common email situations and explaining in which cases an email is counted as open and in which cases an email is counted as unopened.
Right now an open in email terms is actually quite simple: a tagged image on a remote webserver was loaded. That’s all an open is. It used to be that no one was blocking images by default, so this was actually quite an accurate way to measure how many people were opening and presumably reading an email (at least for people using mail clients that display HTML and images).
But, as spammers started including more and more explicit images in email, recipients started asking for images to be blocked. In response to recipient requests, ISPs started blocking images by default. No longer was open rate a measure of which recipients opened and read an email, it became a measure of something completely different.
The EEC has recognized this is a problem and have decided that standardization would be a solution. As the first step to standardization they have identified two problems: open rate isn’t calculated in any standard way and the resulting ratio doesn’t describe what most people think it describes. Their recent publication The Email Render Rate defines standard calculations for render rates. This way render rates as reported by different ESPs can be directly compared. Changing the name from open rate to render rate changes what most people expect that the term means. No longer is this a measure of how many recipients opened the mail, but rather it is a measure of how many email clients rendered the images in the mail.
Maybe a better solution could be arrived at by changing the question? Instead of “how can we standardize render rate?” perhaps they should ask the question: “What do people think they’re measuring when they talk about open rates?”
Once the “what?” question is answered, perhaps a good solution to the “how?” question will become more obvious.

More on e360 v. Choicepoint

Venkat has a longer analysis of the e360 v. Choicepoint case I commented on last week. He’s predicting a quick finding in favor of Choicepoint. I’m not a legal expert by any means, but I can see both sides of this particular case. And I am not sure there is good case law to guide the judge. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Organizing the mail flow

I get a lot of email. On a typical day I will get close to 2000 messages across my various work and personal accounts. About 60 – 70% of that mail is spam and caught by spamassassin or my mta filters and moved into mailboxes that I check once a day for false positives. About 15 – 10% of the remaining mail is from various discussion lists, and those are all sorted into their own mailboxes so I can keep conversations straight. The rest of the email is divided between mail directly to me and various commercial lists I have opted in to.
Up until recently, the commercial mail was all just dumped into my inbox. Nothing special happened to it it just sat there until I could read it. Recently, however, the volume of commercial mail has exploded, swamping my inbox. After losing track of some critical issues, I sat down and fixed my mail filters. Now, all my commercial and marketing mail (ie, mail I signed up for with tagged addresses) is now being filtered into its own mailbox.
There are two takeaways here.
One: the volume of commercial mail has increased significantly. Companies who were previously mailing me once a month are now mailing me twice a week. This contributed to the clutter and resulted in me pushing all commercial mail out of my inbox. I don’t think this increase is limited to just my mailbox, I believe many recipients are seeing an increase in commercial and marketing email, to the point where they’re finding it difficult to keep up with it all.
Two: Recipients have a threshold over which too much email makes their mailbox less usable. Once this threshold is reached they will take steps to change that. In my case, I can just filter all the commercial email as I use tagged addresses for all my signups. In other cases, they may start unsubscribing from all the mail cluttering their mailbox or blocking senders.
It is the tragedy of the commons demonstrated on a small scale.