Recent Posts

Light blogging next 2 weeks.

There will probably be light blogging here the next 2 weeks. Tomorrow I am off to a friend’s wedding down south and next Sunday I am off to the MAAWG meeting in Ft. Lauderdale for 4 days.

Virginia Court Ruling

John Levine has a insightful review of the recent ruling against the VA anti-spam law.

Court strikes down VA anti-spam law

The Virginia Supreme Court overturned the 2003 state law prohibiting sending unsolicited bulk email using false routing information, including phony domain names or IP addresses.

The overlooked secret of marketing

Seth Godin posted recently about the overlooked secret of marketing: time

Fixing mistakes

At BeRelevant Kath posts about common mistakes mailers make and how to recover from them.

Techcrunch50 is going on currently. There are a three email related businesses that have been pitched.
AdRocket: Technology to insert contextual text ads, on a per subscriber basis, into existing newsletters.
OtherInbox: A service allowing individuals to have their own subdomain for email, and an endless supply of email addresses at that domain.
Postbox: A new way to organize, manage and annotate email.
EDIT: Comments closed due to excessive spam

Lashback tackles opt-in fraud

Last week Lashback posted a three part series on opt-in fraud.
One of the issues they commented on is that suppression lists are being passed around and some mailers are actually spamming them. This is something that used to be common, where spammers were harvesting email addresses from opt-out forms and then spamming the addresses or selling them to other mailers. This is why some ISPs and anti-spammers recommend recipients not unsubscribe from mail that they never subscribed to.
In the last few years there has been conflicting data on the prevalence of harvesting unsub or suppression lists. The FTC determined that there was no risk to recipients from unsubscribing. Lashback is now seeing some spam coming into their test addresses.
Overall, there are people who will continue to be suspicious of unsubscribing from mail they do not expect. This will drive up spam complaints and lower delivery. While responsible mailers are not the cause of the negative perception of email, they are competing with the spammers and scammers and sometimes recipients may not draw distinctions. This is why building relationships and trust over email marketing campaigns is such a critical part of delivery.

Alphabetical spammers

There have been a couple posts recently about a paper presented at the Fifth Conference on Email and Spam (CEAS). The paper showed how addresses beginning with different letters get different volumes of spam.
But this post is not really about the paper, although it is an interesting academic review of spam, it is more about a memory that the discussions triggered.
Long ago I was handling the abuse desk at the very large network provider. This was in the days before Feedback loops, so every complaint was an actual forwarded email from a recipient. Generally, we saw a couple dozen complaints about any individual spam problem. Not a huge volume by any means, but that meant that any volume of complaints was significant.
One afternoon I started seeing a spike in complaints about a customer who never received complaints before. I started looking a little deeper and discovered we had around 50 complaints about this mailing, many from people I knew, and all from individuals at domains that started with A. This was one of the few times we actually pulled the plug in the middle of a mailing.
I still remember going to my boss suggesting this was something to take action on now because we had over 50 complaints and they were still in the A‘s! The customer was mortified that the guaranteed opt-in list they purchased was so bad and promised never to spam again.
Have a good weekend everyone.

Results based email marketing

Two articles showed up in my RSS feed in the last 24 articles that touched on different aspects of the same issue. Senders should improve their email marketing program even when they are working well.
Stephanie Miller over at ReturnPath addresses the lost revenue from current programs.

Opt-in Reconfirmation in the Wild

What’s an opt-in reconfirmation email? Also called, as fellow blogger Al
Iverson mentioned lately, a re-engagement email, or a permission pass email.
Al links to DJ Waldow’s write up on Shop.org’s recent re-engagement
strategy, and today I see that Janine Popick, CEO of VerticalResponse,
talking about Coach’s turn at culling their list through this process. What’s interesting here is that, according to Janine, Coach didn’t target this reconfirmation email only at recipients who never open or click. She says she does both, regularly, and received this email message anyway. Another friend of mine, who is also a Coach subscriber, reports to me that she receives regular emails from them (most recently as just about
ten days ago), but that she did not receive this reconfirmation email message.