Recent Posts

ISP Spam

One thing I do not talk about very often is the amount of spam that comes out of ISP smarthosts. Generally this is because many of the major end user ISPs do a reasonable job managing their spam and the ratio of spam to not-spam mail coming out of their IPs is heavily weighted towards the not-spam end of things.
This has not always been the case, and there have been instances where ISPs particularly those providing webmail have been exploited by spammers, often Nigerians, and used to send tons of spam. It can take months to fix, and requires the ISP employees to actively seek and destroy problem accounts, block access from some IP ranges and change their security to prevent future compromises.
We know that spammers exploit webmail services and that there are things that the webmail services need to do. Recently, there seems to have been a massive uptick in the amount of spam coming through Gmail’s servers.
This is not a problem unique to Gmail, most of the other webmail companies have had similar infestations of 419 spammers in the past. The Nigerians figure out how to exploit some part of the webmail infrastructure, create tens of thousands of accounts and send spam through those accounts. Once the ISP fixes the problem, the Nigerians move on to the next webmail provider to abuse. Meanwhile, receivers can block some or most of the Nigerian spam by blocking on the X-Originating-IP. Much of the spam is blocked, but non-spam email from the ISP gets through.
In the Gmail case blocking is not so simple. As a matter of policy, Gmail does not put an originating IP address in email sent through the Gmail interface. Not having originating IPs puts receivers in the position of only having the option of blocking Gmail’s IPs, not the abusers who are using Gmail. This has been an unpopular policy decision by Gmail, and they have been approached by numerous groups to convince them to provide this level of information so receivers can make more selective blocking decisions.
It remains to be seen how quickly Gmail gets their outbound 419 spam under control. The rumblings I am hearing from people about the problem are getting louder. The supporting data quietly being handed around are astonishing and point to a genuine problem at Gmail. Hopefully, Gmail will take action now and stop spammers from abusing their system before the extent of their problem becomes more public.

ReturnPath Joe Job

ReturnPath has posted information about the Joe Job against them.

Vote for a new name

Mickey is trying to decide if his blog needs a new name.

Engaging subscribers

On Friday I talked about using clicks and opens as a way to monitor recipient engagement and dropping recipients who do not interact after a certain period of time. One of the critical parts of this is that a sender must send mail that encourages recipients to click and then actually tracks clicks. If a sender does not send mail that encourages recipients to interact, then using interactions as a way to measure engagement does not work.
For some types of emails this is more difficult than others. One example is newsletters. Newsletters do not always encourage recipients to click through to read the full article and many readers will not click on ads. There are a couple ways around this.
One way is the way used by Ken Magill in his Magilla Marketing Newsletter. In his newsletter there are article slugs to 4 articles, but to see the whole article a reader must click through the link. Ken can quickly see which recipients are actively reading his newsletter by tracking clicks. By writing timely and interesting articles, Ken engages his readers into interacting with his newsletter in a way he can track.
Another way newsletter recipients can be encouraged to interact with the newsletter is demonstrated by the Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society. Their newsletters contain full articles but there have lots of links. These links encourage people to click through to the website to view pictures of cute bunnies, see more stories about the cute bunnies and discover more ways the reader can help save the cute bunnies. Joanna, President of the Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society, says that adding a fun link to emails encourages people to click. She tries to put one fun link (like Howard’s Big Dig) in every email. Give the readers something to pique their interest and they will click through.
For marketing and advertising messages, there are different pressures and partial slugs may not work. Generally, market email must stand on its own and should not rely on readers having to click through to get the full offer. Most marketers also do not have lots of pictures of cute bunnies to encourage readers to click through. Buy our product or the bunny gets it will probably generate a lot of unwanted negative publicity for a company. But there are ways to provide interaction opportunities with recipients in ways that allow senders to track the interaction. Discounts can work, or links to recommended products based on the recipient’s previous purchases. In this case it is not always about getting users to make a purchase, although that is a nice bonus, but just to click on something to indicate they are reading your mail.

Large volumes of mail

John Levine talks about the challenge of handling large volumes of inbound email in a single mailbox.

Comcast "hacked"

Comcast recently had their whois registration password compromised by hackers, who then changed the authoritative DNS servers from the real ones to ones run by the hackers. Today Wired has an article saying that the hackers warned Comcast that this would happen.

Angry Pills Spammer

It looks like Postmaster Direct angered some pills spammer. This morning I received spam redirecting to a Canadian Healthcare pharmacy site (selling me Viagra at 73% off!) containing the footer from a Postmaster Direct email.
The term “Joe Job” is used when a spammer deliberately uses spam to cause harm to a specific person or company. In this case, it may or may not be a Joe Job against Postmaster Direct. There have been cases of spammers stealing text and graphics from legitimate ESPs and using that text in an email. Whether that is to make the ESP look bad or the sender look more legitimate is not clear.
Given ReturnPath’s position in the industry, though, it’s certainly possible this is an aggrieved spammer looking to inflict a little pain on one of the most trusted email certifiers.

Funding the lawsuit

Mickey asks if you want to be the sender that funds the lawsuit that establishes case law about your new, nifty process.

Israel Spam Law

Israel has passed a new anti-spam law requiring senders to only send opt-in email, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Those addresses are costing you

Mark Brownlow has a post up about the hidden costs of bad email marketing. These center around brand damage, but there are other costs to poor email marketing strategies.
Previously, having old and non-responsive email addresses on a mailing list did not hurt and may have helped a reputation at an ISP. In some cases, these addresses may have even helped a reputation by increasing the number of emails delivered thus lowering the overall percentage of complaints.
More recently, some ISPs have started looking at the characteristics of recipients as part of the reputation score of a sender. If a sender is mailing a lot of abandoned email addresses, these ISPs can detect that fact. This counts against a senders reputation and may result in email ending up in the bulk folder or being blocked at the transaction.
Many senders are extremely resistant to removing old addresses from their lists. Some of the more numbers driven ones have even followed the statistics and can tell me exactly how many people ignore their email for 12 months or 18 months, and then come back and make a large purchase. This is true, sometimes people will ignore email for a long time and then come back. Keeping these people on a list may be beneficial.
However, in those recipients who ignore email (no opens, no clicks) for a long time are some addresses that have been abandoned. While these addresses are not spamtraps, repeatedly sending email to large numbers of abandoned addresses will lower the sender’s reputation over time.
All senders should have a process for dealing with non-active addresses. Allowing cruft to accumulate on a list does negatively affect reputation.