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Blog roundup

Denise Cox has a list of 10 things your signup page should have over on her blog.
The AOL postmaster blog has its first post up talking about bounces.
BeRelevant has a great blog with lots of suggestions email best practices.
Mark Brownlow had a great post this weekon moving the unsubscribe button to the top of your newsletter to make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. The comments are a must read as well, including one commenter that saw the number of ‘this is spam’ hits go down when he moved the unsubscribe link to the top of the email.

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AOL Postmaster blog

AOL announced today they are launching a postmaster blog http://journals.aol.com/pmtjournal/blog/
I’ll be updating the blogroll, too. I’ve been checking out some new delivery / marketing blogs the last few weeks.

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Report subscriber and changes to whitelisting at some ISPs

If you’re reading this through the archives please check the date before commenting on this post.

Mark Brownlow has a post on a new technology for senders. I think this will help ensure senders have a say in the general delivery of mail for receivers.
Through the grapevine, I have also heard there’s a new technology developed by a company called Purple Cod. This technology makes it easy for end users to control ISP whitelists. Users at ISPs that deploy this technology will be able to whitelist any sender at the MTA level. When a user receives a mail, there will be a new button “whitelist this sender”. That will exempt that sender from spam filtering of any future email.
The ISPs looking at this technology believe this will improve overall delivery for senders.
In order to fully take advantage of this technology, ISPs will be moving to only allowing email from whitelisted senders to send mail to the ISPs. Senders who are not whitelisted will use a different pool of servers. These servers will only accept 1 in 1000 emails. If a sender gets mail through, and the recipient requests whitelisting then the sender will be moved to the whitelist only pool.
More rumors as I hear them.

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More about FBLs and unsubscribes

In the comments of the last post, Gary DJ asked an insightful questions and I think my answer probably deserves a broader audience.

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FBLs, complaints and unsubscribes

On one of my mailing lists there was a long discussion about the Q Interactive survey. Some of the senders on the list were complaining that unless ISPs provide FBLs they should not use complaints to make filtering decisions. The sender perspective is that it isn’t fair for the ISPs to have data and use it without sharing it back so that the senders could remove complainers.
This deeply, deeply misses the point.
The ISPs are in the business of keeping their users happy. Part of that is measuring how users react to mail. This includes providing “report spam” or similar buttons when they control the interface. Some ISPs have chosen to share that data back with senders. Some ISPs have made the choice not to share that information back.
But even the ISPs that share FBL data with senders do not expect that the only thing a sender will do is remove the email address. ISPs expect senders to actually pay attention, to not send mail that their recipients do not want. They expect that ESPs are going to notice that one customer has consistently high complaint rates and actually force their customer to stop sending mail that recipients think is spam.
Senders should keep track of complaint rates. Measure them per send. Do not waste time whining that this ISP or that ISP will not set you up with a FBL. Take the data from those ISPs that do have FBLs and measure it. It is extremely unlikely that a mailing will have grossly different complaint rates between ISPs. You have all the data you need in order to evaluate how your recipients are perceiving your email.
ESPs and senders who think that their only response to FBL complaints should be to remove that email are the ones most likely to have filtering and blocking problems. The ISPs are giving them valuable data that they can use to evaluate how their emails are being received. Instead of being ungrateful, wagging fingers and blaming the ISPs for not giving them the data they want, senders should spend more time focusing on what they can discover from the data that is shared with them.
A FBL email is more than an unsubscribe request, senders should stop focusing on the unsubscribe portion of the FBL process and focus more on the recipient feedback portion of it. What can you learn about your mail from a FBL?

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Report spam button broken: an ISP perspective

This press release has been discussed in a lot of groups and sites I read. One of my favorite comments comes from one of the filter developers at a large ISP. He was asked “does the overuse/misuse of the this-is-spam button significantly affect the ability to do your job?” His response, reposted with permission,

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How do you use bounce data?

AOL is looking for input from ISPs and ESPs to better understand how you handle data sent to you by AOL.

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Report spam button broken

Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa published a press release today about how fundamentally broken the “report spam” button is. They call for ISPs to make changes to fix the problem. I think the study on recipient perceptions is useful and timely. There is an ongoing fundamental paradigm shift in how ISPs are handling email filters. ISPs are learning how to measure a senders collective reputation with end users, and, more importantly integrate that reputation into the equation used to determine how to filter and deliver incoming email.
Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa acknowledge this change in the report:

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How much mail?

Yesterday I had a call with a potential new client. She told me she had a list of 4M Yahoo addresses and she wanted to mail them twice a day. Her biggest concern was that this volume would be too much for Yahoo and her mail would be block solely on volume. As we went through the conversation, she commented that this list is also being used by someone else she knows and they were getting inbox delivery at Yahoo on every mailing.
From other bits of the conversation, I suspect that these are not the only two people using this list, but I have no feel for the volume. But how much email is each person on that list receiving a day?
I have a current client who is in a similar field to the above potential client. I signed up for their list back in December. Since then I have received 1728 emails to the address I used on their site. 4 of those emails have actually been from my clients, the rest were stolen by a partner of theirs and sold off to all sorts of mailers. Yesterday I received 40 emails.
I just cannot see how this is a valid, long term business model. The bulk of these mails are advertising payday and other kinds of loans. Some of them are duplicate offers from the same senders (judged by CAN SPAM addresses) using different From: lines. The mailbox these mails are filtered into is completely useless, it has been swamped by loan offers. I cannot imagine that anyone, even someone looking for a loan, is receptive to this much email. The only thing I can figure is that the mailers believe that if their email is the one at the top of the mailbox at the exact moment the recipient gets most desperate for money in their bank account tomorrow they will make the sale and get paid.
This model is going to be less and less viable as time goes on.
On the permission level, there really is no permission associated with that email address. Sure, I could call up the former client of mine who mailed that address today and challenge them to show me where they got the address and they would probably tell me they bought it from that company over there. But when I submitted my email address to my client’s site, I did not expect to receive offers for Mickey Mouse Collectible Watches. It certainly is not what I signed up for.
Not only is the permission tenuous, but ISPs are moving away from a permission based model for access to their subscribers. What they really care about now is how recipients react to email. An email marketing model based on getting as much email in front of the recipient as possible will be harder and harder to be profitable as ISPs get better at measuring how much their subscribers want email. The mailers who get good delivery are those are able to make the mail interesting, wanted and relevant to recipients.
It is difficult for me to imagine a case where you can make 2 emails a day relevant to 4 million recipients.

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e360 v. Comcast: part 4

Today I have a copy of the e360 briefing on Comcast’s motion for judgment on the pleadings.
On a superficial level, the writing of e360’s lawyers not as clear or concise as that of the Comcast lawyers. When reading Comcast’s writings it is clear to me that the lawyers have a story to tell and it has a beginning, a middle and an end. They take the reader through the setup, then through the evidence and case law, then proceed to the remedies requested. There is a clear narrative and progression and it all makes sense and the reader is never left standing. This briefing meanders hither and yon, prompting one person to ask was this written on the back of a placemat in crayon.
I still think e360 is misunderstanding or misstating some crucial facts in this case.
e360 argues that because they comply with CAN SPAM, then their mail is therefore not spam. This is not true (see Al’s post, and my post and John’s post). Complying with CAN SPAM does not mean you are not sending spam. I will go even farther to say that sending super-duper-double-confirmed-with-a-cherry-on-top-opt-in email does not mean you will always get through an ISPs filters. The ISPs have moved away from being in the position of having to decide between a mailer who insists a recipient opted in and a recipient who marks mail as spam. Now, the ISPs look at complaints and if you annoy your recipients, then the ISP is going to filter that mail. It is all about relevancy. It is all about not sending mail that is going to make those users hit the “this is spam” button. And endusers have never cared about permission, spam is email they do not want and if you send it, they will complain about it.
They also seem to have this impression that Comcast is letting all e360’s competitors send email to Comcast. Again, it is all about relevancy. If e36o’s competitors are sending mail that users do not complain about then yes, that mail is going to get through. The problem here is not that Comcast is picking and choosing which ESP gets to mail the users, it is that the recipients are choosing which emails they do not object to. Send emails recipients find useful and relevant, and it does not matter that you scraped their address off a website, they will not report it as spam.
Comcast points out that under the Communications Decency Act (CDA) they are not liable for blocking content. The CDA provides for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of content under 2 separate circumstances: 230(c)(1) and 230(c)(2). 230(c)(1) says

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