Recent Posts

10 experts in 50 minutes: predictions for 2016

I’m thrilled to be one of the email experts speaking at the 2016 predictions webinar hosted by SparkPost.
Come join us!

Facebook scams move to LinkedIn

There’s a fairly common Facebook scam where someone clones an account, then sends out friend requests to friends of that person. This actually happened to a friend over the holiday break. The only problem was that most of the folks who got friend requests were actually security people. Security people who thought it was very, very funny to play along with said scammer.
The scam account didn’t last long, partly because FB security is pretty good and partly because a few of the folks the scammer invited were FB employees. I’m sure, though, that for a brief moment the scammer thought he’d found the motherlode of scam victims.
Today I got a similar scam on LinkedIn. A very bare account with little in the way of information about who this was.

I don’t like connecting with these kinds of profile. But, the name does sound vaguely familiar. So I do a little Googling. And I find another LinkedIn profile for the same person, but this profile has a lot more info: A picture, a statement, 500+ connections, all the things one expects from a real person on LinkedIn.
So yes, Facebook scams have rolled over to LinkedIn. Be careful out there, folks. Pay attention to who you’re friending on all social media, not just FB or LinkedIn. Discretion is the better part of valor and all.

Random thoughts on reporting abuse

On IRC today, someone mentioned an Ars Technica article discussing how a research team tried to contact Xfinity about a security flaw in their home security system.

December 2015: The month in email

Happy 2016! We enjoyed a bit of a break over the holidays and hope you did too. Here’s our December wrap up – look for a year-end post later this week, as well as our predictions for the year ahead. I got a bit of a head start on those predictions in my post at the beginning of December on email security and other important issues that I think will dominate the email landscape in 2016.
DMARC will continue to be a big story in 2016, and we’re starting to see more emphasis on DMARC alignment as a significant component of delivery decisions. I wrote a bit more on delivery decisions and delivery improvement here.
December in the world of email is all about the holidays, and this year was no exception. We saw the usual mix of retailers creating thoughtful experiences (a nice unsubscribe workflow) and demonstrating not-so-great practices (purchased list fails). We took a deeper look at the impacts and hidden costs of list purchasing – as much as companies want to expand their reach, purchased lists rarely offer real ROI. And on the unsubscribe front, if you missed our discussion and update on unroll.me unsubs, you may want to take a look.
Steve wrote a detailed post looking at what happens when you click on a link, and how you can investigate the path of a clickthrough in a message, which is useful when you’re trying to prevent phishing, fraud, and other spam. In other malicious email news, the CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown.
In other industry news, some new information for both ESPs and recipients interested in feedback loops and a somewhat humorous look at the hot-button issues that divide our ranks in the world of email marketing. Please share any we may have missed, or any other topics you’d like us to address.

Doing it right

It’s that time of the year – marketers send more email than usual, recipients unsubscribe from their lists.
Clicking on the unsubscription link in the email I just received took me to an unsubscription landing page. The box for my email address was prepopulated based on the cookie in the unsubscription link, the default setting is to unsubscribe me from all mail from the sender and just clicking the sole button on the page will unsubscribe me.
It offers me an alternative to unsubscribing from everything – letting me receive just the content I want. It does that immediately on the unsubscription landing page (rather than suggesting I go to a subscription center or, worse, requiring I click on a different link in the mail originally). And it tells me the important things about the newsletters I might want to subscribe to – what they’re about and how often they’re sent.
oldways
This isn’t anything particularly special, but sometimes it’s nice to highlight someone who is doing it right.

Happy Holidays

Blogging will be light (or non-existent) for the next week or so. I leave you with Valeria and her first Christmas tree from many years ago.
The kittens are older now, we can have a tree complete with lights AND ornaments.
See y’all in the new year!

New FBL information

A couple new bits of information for folks interested in participating in feedback loops.
If you’re an ESP, you’ll want to sign up for the two new FBLs that were released this month. XS4ALL and Telenor are now offering complaint feeds to senders.
If you’re a mail recipient and want the ability to report spam, try the new browser/MUA plugins for reporting spam released by the French anti-spam grup Signal Spam
These browser plugins allow recipients to report spam directly from a button in the browser. Signal Spam reports:
The button is working for the biggest webmails around, such as yahoo!, SFR, gmail, outlook, AOL, laposte, free, and is downloadable for Chrome, Safari and Firefox with this links :
Chrome
Safari
Firefox
These plugins are currently in beta, but should be released by the end of 2016.
For those folks who use our ISP information page, I haven’t yet added Telenor and XS4ALL to the pages of available FBLs. Part of that is because we’re looking at options to improve data presentation and ease of maintenance. The perl script that magically generated the summary page from other pages was great, until it hid itself on some VM somewhere and can’t be found. There are other things we want to maintain as public resources, so we’re looking into options. (wikimedia was one of our early attempts… it didn’t do what we needed). Anyone have a public KB or wiki package they particularly like?

DoorDash gets it

Increase in unsubscribes

UPDATE 12/17/2015 2:30PM Pacific: I heard from Josh, the CEO of Unroll.me. He says:

Holiday season

We’re 10 days out from Christmas, 9 days out from the end of binge-shopping-season (and 11 days out from return season). Unlike previous years, I haven’t heard of any significant delivery challenges. Most of what I’m hearing is the normal day-to-day stuff. There’s a little more of it, but nothing like in years past where ISPs melted down or giant companies got SBLed.
This is all good! This is progress and is great for senders.
Things here, and I’m pretty sure many other places are slowing down. We’re looking forward to next year, to new projects and clients, to new challenges and changes.
Blogging will probably be slow from now through the end of the year. I have stuff to talk about, but the issues are complex and I’m working on the best way to write about them. And I’m coming to the decision that writing might not be the best for certain posts.