Recent Posts

Anger

Seth Godin writes about angry people. Every marketer should ask where their recipients are on that curve.

As you can see we have updated the blog theme. This is a custom theme based on the WordPress K2 theme. The overall look is much lighter and fits in better with our main website.
As part of the change I have also re-categorized all the previous posts into 4 categories:

Yahoo suing lottery spammers

Yahoo filed suit against spammers using the Yahoo trademarks in lottery spam on May 19th.

More evidence the DMA does not get it

A friend of mine sent me a link to a blog a few weeks ago. Jeff Nolan points out that to get to content on the DMA website one must go through a registration process. Not only do you have to register, but the registration requires you first search the DMA database to see if you are already registered. Jeff has screen shots of the process.
I fully understand the desire to control access to information put on the web, and the desire to know who is reading your stuff. And, of course, the DMA is all about collecting personal information in order to provide meaningful targeted advertising to recipients. If this is not their goal with the website, then there is no reason to require registration.
Taken with the EEC fiasco, it demonstrates that the DMA is not a leader in online marketing.

Hard drive failure

I’m feeing a bit disconnected today. See, my hard drive failed last night and my laptop would not boot. Thanks to the local Apple store Genius bar and Apple Care my current laptop is in getting repaired. Unfortunately, that means I am stuck on my old machine without any of my RSS feeds or bookmarks and a mail client that has taken all day to sync with my IMAP server.
Tomorrow will be better.

Political Spam

At Adventures in Email Marketing, there is a post up this morning about political spam. It seems Anna discovered that providing her email address on her voter registration card not only results in political groups sending her email to that address, but also that political email does not have to follow the rules of CAN SPAM. The article ends with a few questions and makes some suggestions.

Disposable or Temporary Addresses

Mark Brownlow has a really good post up today about disposable and temporary addresses and how they affect marketers trying to build an opt-in list.
I use tagged addresses for all my signups, and have for more than 10 years now. It lets me track who I gave an address to and if this mail is contrary to what I signed up for or the address has leaked, I can shut down mail to that address entirely.
Tagged addresses also have another function. One of our local brew pubs has a rewards program, spend money there, get points. As part of the signup process, they requested an email address. All the email I have received from them has been clearly branded, well designed, they are an example of how to use email right. That is until last week. Last week I received an email to the tagged address from some survey company. The survey company provided no branding, nothing.

Verifying email addresses

Over at CircleID Aviram Jenik posts about using email addresses as identification and how that can go horribly wrong if the website does no verification. In his case, the problem is a user who has made a purchase using Aviram’s gmail address and Aviram now has access to the other users personal information. As he explains it:

Botnets

Terry Zink has been posting articles about botnets as traced by Hotmail. I do not often talk about botnets as they are outside my area of expertise. They are not something I deal with, as no one who uses botnets is welcome as a client here.
My clients and I, however, do have to deal with the fallout from botnets. Because of botnets, receiver ISPs are extremely suspicious of mail from any IP address that they have not seen mail from previously. Mail from new IPs is, more often than not, a newly infected Windows machine. This results in mail from new IPs not starting with a reputation of zero but starting with a negative reputation.
Botnets are another example of spammers making it more difficult for mailers with permission to use email.

Recent Posts

Anger

New Blog Theme