Recent Posts

Soft bounces and rate limiting

What is your policy for handling soft bounces? What do you consider a soft bounce? What is the right thing to do about soft bounces?
The first step in talking about soft bounces is to define them. When I talk about soft bounces, I mean mail that has been rejected with a 4xx response during the SMTP transaction. As described by RFC5321, when a recipient MTA responds with a 4xx it is telling the sending MTA “Wait! I can’t take this mail right now. Come back a little later and try again.” The sending MTA will then continue to attempt to deliver the message until either it is delivered or until it hits the max delivery time, usually 3 – 5 days.
In a well behaved and RFC compliant MTA, messages that have reached the maximum time without delivery due to 4xx rejections will be converted to permanent rejections (5xx). With a correct MTA, this means too many emails in a row timing out shoud result in an email address being removed from future mailings.
For a number of reasons some ISPs, notably Yahoo, are using 4xx responses to slow down mail from some senders. Many senders treat this as a inconvenience and a frustration and try to figure out how to get around the rate limiting. The UK DMA published an article on soft bounces with the following words of wisdom.

Brand name spam

I’ve been getting a lot more spam advertising name brand companies. Places like FTD Flowers, Seattle Coffee Direct, Wal-Mart, Jet Blue, Gevalia and VistaPrint seem to all be working with spammers. In some cases, I am getting the same email to different email addresses from different domains and different IP addresses.
I am sure, if asked, all the advertised companies would say they have no knowledge of spamming by their vendors. I’m sure they would say that their vendors tell them I opted in to the email and must have just forgotten. I am sure that this isn’t really spam.
Except it really is spam. Real companies with real brands do use the services of spammers. When caught they loudly protest their innocence and talk about rogue affiliates. In the best cases they will “fire” the affiliate and then look the other way when the affiliate signs back up.
Spam is sending mail to people who never requested it. Hiring someone to do it for you doesn’t mean you aren’t a spammer. With the economy tanking and companies trying to maximize their bottom line, more and more name brands seem to be jumping on the spam bandwagon. It is not an unexpected development, but it will mean more aggressive spam filtering and more difficult email delivery for everyone.

Words of wisdom from the hallway

Sitting around talking with folks in the hallway. One ISP rep mentions “we think we have found another front company of theirs…”
My only comment was “If a company needs to create a front company…” We all just looked at each other and didn’t need to come up with the “then…”
Really, if a sender thinks they must establish front companies to get connectivity or get customers or get delivery… then this is an admission of guilt.

Palpable ennui

Put any group of senders together and the conversation invariably turns to discussions of how to get email delivered to the Inbox. There is an underlying flavor to most of these conversations that is quite sad. Many senders seem to believe that the delivery of their email is outside of their control and that since the ISPs are difficult to reach that senders are stuck. The ennui is palpable.
I am here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth!
Senders are not passive victims of the evil ISPs. In 99% of cases, delivery problems are fully under the control of the sender.
Mail being deferred? Mail being blocked? Mail being delivered to the bulk folder? Senders do NOT NEED TO CALL THE ISP to fix most of these. Tickets do not need to be opened nor do personal contacts need to be employed. You can resolve the vast majority of problems with data you already have.

Affiliate Liability

Eric Goldman published his notes on affiliate liability from his talk at SMX West. He mentions some cases where a company was sued under CAN SPAM. Unlike general legal statutes, where non-agents cannot create liability for a company, under CAN SPAM companies are liable for the actions of their advertisers. Despite this statutory difference, both the FTC and private litigants have had difficulty proving in court that the advertised company was liable for the activity of the affiliate.
Any company that is using affiliate marketing on the Internet needs to take a look at the article and the best practices defined by Eric.

Gearing up for MAAWG

One of the nice bits of SF MAAWG is that I don’t actually have to get on a plane in order to get to the conference. Still there seems to be a very long list of “things to do” before heading up to the city.
If you’re going to be there, stop by and say Hi

Double opt-in, it's not what you think it is

Bill McCloskey has a post over on ClickZ about single opt-in vs. double opt-in. The post itself is generating a lot of buzz in the industry and has pages and pages of comments. I’m not going to really comment on the post, as I think much of what I would say has been covered in the comments, in posts here and in every email marketing discussion that has happened in the last 5 years.
I do want to comment on one of the comment’s however. This comment makes the assertion that “double opt-in was a term designed by spammers to make confirmed opt-in look too troublesome and problematic to use.” This is a bit of lore that is deeply, deeply established in the minds of many anti-spammers. There is a core group of activists that are completely convinced that anyone who ever uses the term double opt-in to refer to a confirmation practice is not only a spammer, but a lying scammer. They cannot imagine a world where someone might use this term while actually supporting the practice.
The problem with this belief is that it’s not true. Double opt-in was mostly used by PostmasterDirect (now part of ReturnPath) as a way to market their email addresses. PostmasterDirect actually patented a process for confirming addresses and used double opt-in as a way to distinguish themselves in the market place. It wasn’t that double opt-in was twice as hard as opt-in, it’s that their email address lists were twice as good as those other lists that you might be thinking of buying.
So, no, double opt-in is not spammer speak. It is, in fact, often the speech of a sender who is attempting to do the right thing. The fact that the sender does not know a made up history of a term does not turn them into a lying spammer. Asserting that it does says a lot more about the person making the assertion.

Question from the comments

On yesterday’s post there is a question in the comments that I think needs a bit more discussion.

The unexpected email

In almost every discussion of “how to stop spam” someone will come up with the idea that if a recipient only allowed known people to send them email then the spam problem would be solved. There are lots of problems with this type of solution, but one of the biggest is that it ignores that sometimes the unexpected email is wanted. Typically, these unexpected but wanted emails is from an old friend or contact. But sometimes, the unexpected email can actually look like unsolicited bulk email and yet be wanted.
I actually received one of those emails today. The folks at http://schmap.com found my flickr stream and sent me email asking me for permission to use a couple of my photos in their London city guide. Completely unexpected, but very welcome email.
Sometimes, in the struggle to keep email useful and to keep spam out of the inbox, we forget how useful and wanted that unexpected email can be.

Building a list for the long term

Mark Brownlow asks 2 key questions senders should be thinking about for their list building strategy for 2009.